I didn't have an answer. Not yet.
"Ruth," I said, "can I keep this? Just to make a copy?"
"Keep it," she said. "Burn it. I don't want it in my house."
* * *
That night I couldn't sleep, so I did what I always did when I couldn't sleep, which was work.
I laid the two pictures side by side on my screen, theirs scanned at high resolution on my little all-in-one printer, mine straight off the camera. I measured angles. Their picture had been taken from farther down Larkspur than my WH-1 tag, maybe from the street itself, maybe from a car window — there was a sliver of something dark and curved at the bottom left of the frame that might have been a side mirror. But the buckeye was in both, and the pin oak, and Ruth's house. Three fixed objects. The house couldn't tell time. The trees could.
I went back through my whole archive of WH-1 and WH-2, every frame from January through April of 2025, comparing the buckeye's buds and the pin oak's leaves with their picture. The pin oak was the trickier one, because marcescent leaves stay on all winter and look much the same from December to April. But there's a progression, if you look at it twice a week for two years. In the early winter the leaves are still a rich russet. By February they've bleached to a pale tobacco color and many have torn away in the wind; the crown thins. In their picture, the pin oak was thin and pale. Late winter.
And then, at about one in the morning, I noticed something else, something that made me sit back in my chair.
In their picture, in the far background, past the pin oak, just visible over the roofline of the Abernathys' old house on Thrasher Court, there was a yellow excavator.
I knew that excavator. The county had replaced the storm culvert under Thrasher Road the previous winter — it had been in the Larkin newsletter, and I had complained about the beeping. The excavator had been parked on the shoulder from the second week of February into the first week of March. I had it in four of my WH-2 frames. February 21. February 25. February 28. March 4. By my March 7 photo, it was gone.
So the photograph that the Wren Hollow Homeowners Association had attached to a notice of intent to lien, labeling it as evidence of a violation observed on July 2, 2025, had been taken in the second half of February, or the first few days of March, 2025. More than four months earlier. Before Ruth's son painted the trim. Before the grass greened. Before anybody, by any reasonable standard, could be said to have "failed to cure" anything.