I didn't put it together. I'd like to say I did. But I was teaching full-time and coaching Science Olympiad and parenting a ten-year-old and fighting a fox citation, and when you're that busy, a pattern that should be obvious just looks like weather. It's raining again. The HOA sent another letter. Sheryl Kinsella walked by at 6:10 a.m. and slowed down at the roses.
The only person who said it out loud, before any of this, was Mrs. Verna Haverty, who lived across the street at 113 and had lived there since 1999 and who was, at eighty-three, the most dangerous person I have ever met.
"She wants you gone," Verna said, one evening in late August. She was sitting in a lawn chair at the end of her driveway, as she did most evenings, with a can of ginger ale and a pair of binoculars she claimed were for birds. "You know that, don't you?"
"Who?"
"Don't you who me, Grady. Sheryl. Our Karen of Kestrel Court." Verna was the only person I ever heard call her that to her face, and she did it at a block party once, with a deviled egg in her hand, and Sheryl pretended not to hear. "She wanted that house. She wanted it for Brynn."
"Who's Brynn?"
Verna looked at me over her binoculars the way you'd look at a dog who had walked into a sliding glass door.
"Her daughter. Thirty-four. Went through a bad stretch, lost her job in Charlotte, came home with a little boy. Sheryl had it all planned. Brynn and the baby would move into Hildur's house and Sheryl could walk across the yard every morning, and everything would be the way it was supposed to be. But Hildur's estate went to probate, and Sheryl's brother Stellan was the executor, and Stellan lives in Arizona and doesn't like her, and he put it on the open market and took the highest offer." She took a sip of ginger ale. "Which was you."
"I didn't know any of that."
"Of course you didn't. That's what makes it so unfair. To you, I mean." She lowered the binoculars. "And to her too, I suppose. She's not a monster. She's a woman whose mother died and whose daughter came home sad and who thinks if she can just get the furniture back in the right rooms, it'll all be fixed. I've known her twenty-five years. She brought me soup every day for a month when my Harold passed. I'm telling you this so you'll be careful, not so you'll hate her."
"Careful how?"
Verna shrugged. "People who think they're fixing something," she said, "will do just about anything."
By lunch on the day of the shed, the post was up.