After the officers finished documenting the scene, they led her back up the hill. She kept insisting she'd done nothing wrong. Then the officers turned to me.
"Sir," the tall one said, "we're going to recommend charges for trespassing, utility theft, and filing a false report. We'll need a formal statement later."
Karen let out the kind of shriek usually reserved for horror movies. "You can't do this to me! I'm the victim! This is my mountain community!"
"No, ma'am," the officer replied. "This is his property, and you've got a lot to answer for."
As she protested, struggling, sputtering, the younger officer gently cuffed her hands behind her back. The sight of that orange cord lying limp on my porch behind her felt like poetic justice: a bright, tangled symbol of how entitlement always, always knots itself up in the end.
They guided her toward the cruiser. She screamed the whole way—something about lawyers, something about calling the mayor, something about suing me for emotional distress. But the moment the cruiser door closed and the locks clicked, the mountain went quiet again. Peaceful, just the way I intended when I bought the place.
They drove her off the mountain, her shrieks fading into the distance like some kind of unhinged wildlife call echoing through the trees.
You'd think the story would end there with Karen in the back of a cruiser, justice served, peace restored. But life in the mountains has a funny way of stretching things out. Nothing is ever that simple.
The officer stayed behind for a few minutes, taking additional photos and asking follow-up questions. The tall one, Officer Daniels, pulled out a small notebook and flipped to a fresh page.
"Sir, before we clear out, walk me through your timeline one more time," he said.
So I did: from the strange electric bills to the spinning meter, from killing the breakers to planning the stakeout, all the way up to catching Karen with the orange extension cord in hand. Daniels wrote everything down carefully, nodding occasionally, his expression shifting from neutral professionalism to something a little more annoyed—not at me, at her, at the nonsense they'd been dragged into.
"Just so we're clear," he said after I finished, "you never gave her permission to be on your property or to use your utilities."
"I wouldn't let a cousin borrow electricity," I said. "Let alone a stranger with a cord longer than most driveways."
The younger officer, Cole, I think his name was, snorted a laugh, but quickly pretended he hadn't.
Daniels closed his notebook. "All right, we'll file the initial report. The detective unit will follow up for formal statements. From what we saw, this is a pretty cut-and-dry case." He hesitated. "She may try to spin more stories. People like her tend to double down before they give in."