Across the court, a garage door rolled up, and Octave Thibodeau came out in a plaid bathrobe and slippers with a mug in his hand, the way he did every morning to look at the sky. He stopped at the end of his driveway. He looked at the meter lid lying upside down on my gravel. He looked at the trench. He looked at Georgine, standing very straight beside the pit with the meter key held against her like a flag, and at me, and at Pia with the towel on her head. He didn't say anything. He went back into his garage and came out again a minute later without the mug, and walked over and stood at the edge of my yard, a little behind me, like a man who wanted it to be clear which side of the street he had come from.
"My doorbell camera points right at this corner," he said to me quietly. "Records everything. I'll pull it for you."
"Thanks."
"It's no trouble." He looked at Georgine. "Morning, Georgie."
"Octave," she said, without turning.
That was all anyone said for a while. A pickup went by on the boulevard and slowed down to look. The sun cleared the roof of the clubhouse and lit the bluegrass on the Gateway Green, which was still wet from the night before, and every blade of it sparkled, and I remember thinking how strange it was that it was wet, when it wasn't a watering day, and I remember not finishing the thought, because just then a Cottonwood Bluffs police cruiser turned off the boulevard and pulled up along the curb.
The officer who got out was a stocky woman in her thirties with a blond braid and a nameplate that said KASPRZAK. She took her sunglasses off as she walked up and looked at all of us in turn, the way a substitute teacher looks at a classroom, trying to figure out who to ask.