"I'd just like the court to know," I said, "that I don't want anything else from her. I'd like her to get whatever help she needs. And I'd like the record to show that I have taken good care of her mother's roses."
Sheryl didn't turn around. But her shoulders moved.
Rhoda handled the civil side. She drafted a defamation complaint, which she sent to Sheryl's lawyer with a cover letter that she read to me over the phone and that I can only describe, using my colleague's phrase, as a very polite thunderstorm. It listed every post, every comment, every letter, the camera revocation, the emergency hearing notice, the phrase "fitness for residence," and all four letters from Shawna Biddle, because by then Quist's report had confirmed what I'd half-guessed at in my kitchen in August: Shawna Biddle's client with the "deep personal connection" to my home had been Sheryl Kinsella herself. She'd been trying to buy it back for Brynn and Milo. The cash was from her own retirement savings. She'd told Shawna she'd go as high as she needed to.
The settlement took six weeks. Sheryl paid my legal fees and Pascal's forensic bill in full. She posted a retraction on the neighbors' page, written by her lawyer and approved by Rhoda, which said, in part, I made false statements about my neighbor and I knowingly placed items on his property to make it appear he had committed a crime. He did not. I am deeply sorry. The same words appeared, in a box on the front page, in the next issue of the Kestrel Run quarterly newsletter. And she paid an amount I won't name into two places I chose: the Piedmont Wildlife Rehabilitation Center, which takes in injured owls and foxes, and the county education foundation, earmarked for classroom science equipment.
"You could have asked for a lot more," Rhoda said, when I signed. "For the leave alone. For the emotional distress. You'd have gotten it."
"I know."
"So why didn't you?"
I thought about Sheryl's hand on the rose cane at 5:39 in the morning, four seconds, on the side-yard camera. "Because I have to live next to her," I said. "Maybe for thirty years. I'd like there to be something left over at the end."
Sheryl resigned as president of the Kestrel Run HOA at the December board meeting. She did it by letter; she didn't attend. Doug became interim president and said, in the meeting, that he'd only do it until the spring election, and that he'd like to propose a bylaw requiring that any architectural or nuisance complaint against a property be reviewed by a board member who wasn't the adjacent owner. It passed unanimously. Verna Haverty, who had come to the meeting with her binoculars in her purse "in case," announced from the floor that she would be running for the board in the spring, and nobody had the nerve to tell her she was eighty-three.
Brynn Kinsella came to my door in January.
I knew who she was before she said it. She had her mother's chin and her father's height, and she was holding the hand of a small boy of about four in a dinosaur raincoat who was staring with enormous interest at the owl post in my backyard, which he could see through the side gate.
"I'm Brynn," she said. "I'm—"