The police had a theory at first, and Helen told me what it was without any bitterness in her voice. They believed Naomi had been targeted through social media. That was the simple explanation. A teenager, a phone, a stranger online, a link. It fit the shape of the stories police officers hear every week. Helen disagreed. She did not disagree loudly. She disagreed the way a technician disagrees, by following the signal back to its source instead of arguing about the theory.
She followed the camera angle. She looked at the angle of the livestream, at the height and the direction and the view of the bedroom window from above, and she traced that angle backward across the fence and across my yard and up to my roof. Panel number six faced Naomi's second-floor window. It faced it.
Then Helen told me the pattern, and the pattern was what finally made my stomach drop. Every time she damaged my solar system, the private feed went offline. Every time BrightCurrent repaired it, the feed returned. Four times she had climbed onto my roof, and four times the feed had obeyed her. That was not a coincidence. That was a switch. My roof was the switch, and Helen had found it by breaking it.
I thought about the first three times then, the times I had blamed on teenagers and then on the contractor, the times that had cost me hundreds of dollars each and had nearly cost me my insurance coverage. The tar. The cut cables. The cloudy substance sprayed across the glass that reduced the system's output by almost half. I had stood in my yard after each one and felt angry at strangers I could not name. I had never once looked at Helen, seventy-two years old, carrying a can of paint up a ladder, because I could not fit her into the shape of a vandal. Now she was telling me that each of those acts had been deliberate, and each of them had been aimed at one thing only: shutting down a transmitter that was watching her granddaughter.
She had not only followed the camera angle. She had followed the signals themselves. Helen had spent thirty-four years as a communications technician for a regional telephone company, repairing relay systems and identifying unauthorized signals, and that experience was written all over the way she talked that morning. She named things. She said she had detected fourteen separate signals originating from solar installations throughout Brookhaven. Fourteen. Not one camera on one roof, but fourteen signals, each one coming from a different solar installation, each one part of something larger than my house or her house or Naomi's bedroom window.
Together, she said, they formed a private wireless network. My roof was the central relay. My array was the hub that the other signals passed through. When my array went offline, the entire network stopped transmitting. Every hidden device in the neighborhood went dark at once, because the center had gone dark. That was why she had targeted my house again and again. That was why she had come back a fourth time with red paint on a Saturday morning while I was still asleep inside.
She said it plainly, and I want to remember her exact plainness, because it changed everything I thought about her. She was not trying to punish me. She had never been trying to punish me. She was cutting power to every hidden device in the neighborhood. The tar, the cables, the spray, the paint, all of it had one purpose, and that purpose was not revenge or anger or spite. It was a shutoff. She could not reach the devices themselves, so she reached the power that fed them, and she reached it through my roof because my roof was the center of the whole thing.
I stood there trying to hold two facts in my head at the same time. The first fact was that my neighbor had destroyed my property four times. The second fact was that she had done it to stop someone from watching her granddaughter and, it turned out, from watching my daughter too, although I did not fully understand that part yet. The two facts did not cancel each other out. They sat side by side, both true, both heavy, and I did not know what to do with either of them.