I lived at 114. Our side yards met at a split-rail fence that was more suggestion than barrier, with a gap at the back corner where a pair of old climbing roses had pulled two rails loose years before I ever arrived.
I had bought 114 Kestrel Court eighteen months earlier. It was a small brick ranch, the oldest house on the street, built before the subdivision grew up around it, and it had been sold by the estate of a woman named Hildur Engstrom, who had lived in it for forty-four years. I'd liked it because it was one floor, because it was ten minutes from the middle school where I teach seventh-grade life science, and because the backyard backed onto a strip of protected wetland where, on the evening I first walked the property, I'd heard an eastern screech owl doing its little descending whinny in the dark. I bid on it that night. I was told later there had been another bidder, a family, but I didn't think much about that at the time. You don't, when you win.
What I did not know when I signed was that Hildur Engstrom had been Sheryl Kinsella's mother.
I learned it my first week. Sheryl came over with a chicken and rice casserole in a disposable pan and a three-ring binder with tabs, and she stood in my kitchen and told me which cabinet her mother had kept the good glasses in, and that the roses on the fence were Mother's, a variety called New Dawn that Mother had planted in 1981, and that she hoped I'd be the kind of person who appreciated what I had. Then she opened the binder to the tab labeled ARCHITECTURAL GUIDELINES and walked me through it page by page while the casserole cooled on the counter.
I thanked her. I meant it, mostly. I'm a single dad with a ten-year-old and a full teaching load, and a casserole is a casserole. I also kept the roses. I want that on the record. I pruned them in February the way a YouTube horticulturist told me to, and they came back in May so thick and pale pink they looked like a cloud had snagged on the fence. Sheryl never said a word about it. But I'd sometimes see her in the early morning, out on her walk, slowing down at the corner of my lot to look at them.
Now, three steps behind a police officer, she was looking at me.
"What kind of theft?" I asked Moreland.
He glanced at his partner. The woman, whose tag said ALVARADO-PIKE, stepped up beside him. She had the calm, unhurried voice of somebody who'd done this five thousand times.
"Ms. Kinsella reports that some personal garments were taken from a clothesline in her backyard sometime early this morning," she said. "She reports that she observed a male individual leaving her yard and entering yours. Do you have an outbuilding on the property, sir? A shed?"
"I have a potting shed," I said. "It's a garden shed. It's where I keep the mower."
"Would you mind if we took a look in it?"
There's a version of me that says no. I've thought about him a lot since. He's a smarter man than I am, maybe, and he says, I'd like to speak to an attorney first, and the officers nod and go away and come back with paper, and none of it unfolds the way it did. But the version of me who was actually standing there had a ten-year-old on the stairs behind him and a bus coming at 8:05 and nothing whatsoever to hide, and so I said, "Sure. Of course. It's not locked."
Pippa came down to the bottom stair. "What garments?"