But Vanessa Aldridge was not done. Not even close. If I had thought the impoundment notice was the bottom, I was wrong. The bottom was deeper, and she was determined to take me there.
It started with the smear campaign. A flyer appeared in mailboxes all over Willow Creek Preserve, printed on plain white paper with no name on it. It said that a resident was harboring a dangerous, oversized animal in violation of community rules. It said the animal had lunged at a child. It said the resident had threatened board members. None of it was true. Ranger had never lunged at anyone. I had never threatened anyone. But the flyer did not need to be true. It needed to be believed. And some people believed it. I started getting looks on my evening walks. A woman crossed the street to avoid us. A man I did not know told me, loudly, in front of his kids, to keep my "beast" away from his family. Ranger, who had been trained to ignore distractions, ignored them. I tried to. It was harder for me than it was for him.
Then came the break-in. I came home from the grocery store on a Saturday afternoon and found my back patio gate standing open and my patio furniture overturned. Nothing was stolen. The welcome mat was gone. The wind chime Marisol had given me was smashed on the concrete. Ranger sniffed around the patio with his hackles up, which I had never seen him do at home. I called the police. The responding officer took a report and said, carefully, that there was no evidence of who had done it. But Marisol, when I told her, went pale. "Daniel," she said, "you need to get cameras. Now. Today." I drove to the electronics store that afternoon and bought two security cameras, and I installed them myself, one over the front door and one over the patio. I put the footage on a loop. I put a sign in the window that said PREMISES UNDER VIDEO SURVEILLANCE. I hated that sign. I hated that my home, my first home, my peaceful place, needed a sign like that.
The cameras caught something within the week. At two seventeen in the morning on a Wednesday, a figure in a hoodie walked up to my front door, looked directly into the camera, and taped something to the door. Then the figure walked away. In the morning, I found a note. It said, in block letters, GET RID OF THE DOG OR ELSE. I called the police. I called Rachel. I called David. Rachel said, "Save the footage. Don't touch the note. The FBI may want to see it." The FBI. I sat at my kitchen table and put my head in my hands, and Ranger came and leaned his whole weight against me, all seventy-eight pounds of him, like he was trying to hold me together.
The police increased patrols in the neighborhood. A detective named Detective Alvarez came to my house and took a statement and the footage and the note. He said, "Mr. Reeves, I want you to know we take this seriously." I believed him. But I also knew that a patrol car driving by twice a night was not going to stop someone who was determined. I started sleeping with my bedroom door locked. I started checking the cameras before I took Ranger out in the morning. The noise in my head, which had been getting quieter since I moved in, came roaring back. The nightmares returned. Ranger woke me from them, night after night, putting his paw on my chest, whining softly until I came back to the room, to the house, to him. I do not know what I would have done without him. I do not like to think about it.
And then, in the middle of all of it, Ranger got sick. It started with vomiting on a Thursday morning. By the afternoon, he was lethargic, refusing food, which for a Labrador is the equivalent of a human refusing to breathe. I took him to the vet, panicked in a way I had not been since the IED. The vet, Dr. Sandoval, ran bloodwork and X-rays. She said it looked like he had ingested something toxic. She asked me if there was any chance he had gotten into chemicals, pesticides, rat poison. I thought about the evening walks. I thought about the perfect green lawns. I thought about the flyer and the note and the smashed wind chime. "Keep him here," Dr. Sandoval said. "We'll flush his system. He'll need to stay overnight." I sat in the waiting room for six hours. I called Marisol, and she came and sat with me. I called Diane at Paws Forward, and she cried again. When Dr. Sandoval finally came out and said Ranger was going to be okay, I put my face in my hands and sobbed like a child. Marisol held my shoulder and did not say anything, because there was nothing to say.