"Tonight, I won't," I said. "Not unless you want to help us carry a dresser."
I said it with a smile. I'd like that on the record. I had been awake since four, I had driven three hundred and ten miles from Richmond with my father in the passenger seat asking me every forty minutes whether we'd remembered to stop the newspaper, and I still said it with a smile.
Marcella Vasbinder did not smile back. She raised her phone and took a picture of the Diplomat, then of the box truck, then, after a small hesitation that I don't think she'd be proud of now, of Jerome. The flash went off in his face. He blinked and kept walking.
"You'll be hearing from the board," she said.
"I look forward to it."
That was when she did it. She turned to go, looked back over her shoulder, and lifted her right hand, and there it was, slim and pale and very deliberate, a coral-pink nail at the end of it, catching the light from my flashlight. She held it for maybe two full seconds. Then she walked off up Plover Lane, her flashlight bobbing, and turned in at the big gray house on the corner with the black shutters and the flag that hung exactly straight even though there was no wind.
One of Jerome's friends, a soft-spoken kid named Tou who I later learned lived two streets over with his grandmother, said, very quietly, "Oh, that's Mrs. V. Everybody calls her the Karen of Bittern Ridge. Not to her face."
"Somebody ought to," Jerome said.
"Nobody ought to," I said. "Get the dresser."
I want to explain why I didn't say more, because I've thought about it a great deal since, and because a lot of people later assumed I was playing some kind of game, letting her dig. I wasn't. The truth is simpler and a little less flattering. I was tired. I was fifty-four years old and I had spent the last twenty-nine of them as a police officer, the last eleven in Richmond's Office of Professional Standards, which is a polite name for the unit that investigates other cops. I had sat across tables from men who'd lied under oath, women who'd stolen from evidence, sergeants who'd decided which neighborhoods got patrolled like they were choosing which rooms of a house to clean. I had been called every name there is by people who wore the same badge I did. A woman in a visor flipping me off over a pickup truck did not register very high on the scale.