The third appeared on the Brecks' front lawn.
Kayla and Wyatt Breck lived three doors down from me, in the gray two-story with the hydrangeas. They were in their early thirties, she a dental hygienist, he something in logistics that involved a lot of phone calls in the driveway. They had a two-year-old named Mabel who wore rain boots in all weather and had, on more than one occasion, run up to Rook on the sidewalk with her arms open, and Rook had lowered his big head and allowed her to pat his nose with the grave tolerance of a bishop receiving a parishioner.
Mabel found the third one at seven in the morning on a Tuesday. She found it with her rain boots, and then, because she was two, with her hands.
I heard Kayla before I saw her. I was in my kitchen with my coffee and I heard a sound through the window, a high, furious, disgusted sound, and I went out onto the porch and saw her on her lawn holding Mabel at arm's length like a bomb, Mabel wailing, Wyatt running out of the house in his socks with the garden hose.
I went down to help. I'm a nurse. It's a reflex.
"Don't," Kayla said, when I was halfway across her lawn. She didn't shout it. She said it low and flat, which was worse. "Just don't, Bernie."
"Kayla, I want you to know, that wasn't Rook. He doesn't—"
"There's a letter on your door," she said. "I saw Candace put it there. At six-fifteen. She was walking by, she saw it, she put a letter on your door. Okay? So don't."
"Candace saw it at six-fifteen?"
"She walks every morning." Kayla had Mabel's hands under the hose now, and Mabel had progressed from wailing to a kind of outraged hiccupping. "She's the only person in this neighborhood who actually does anything. Do you know what's in that stuff? Do you know what she could get from that?"
I did know. I could have listed it for her, alphabetically. Instead I went back to my house and looked at the letter on my door, which was for five hundred dollars this time, and which said, under Additional Notes, Waste was deposited on private property at 22 Sandpiper Court, resulting in direct contact by a minor child. The Board considers this a matter of health and safety and will be reviewing further remedies.