Cole watched it twice without comment. Then she turned to him and said, "Tell me about the rest of it."
Marcus went inside and brought out the folder. It was a thick folder, thicker than he liked to admit, full of photographs, letters, and incident numbers, which he set on the patio table between them. He had started it in March, when the trouble began, and added to it every time something happened, because something in him, the billing analyst's instinct for a paper trail, had told him a record would matter someday even if nobody believed him yet.
"This has been going on since March," he said.
Cole opened the folder and began to read, and Marcus talked while she read, filling in the parts the photographs could not show.
It had started with the landscaping crew. In March, Marcus had hired a crew to clear the dead shrubs along the rear fence, Celia's garden's last overgrown section. The crew had been working for an hour when one of them called Marcus over. Beneath a root cluster, half buried in the soil, they had found a circular metal cap, about four inches wide, stamped with letters and numbers: P-47C. Marcus had never seen it before and did not know what it was. He photographed it, because that was what he did with things he did not understand, and went inside to look up the marking.
He had not gotten far when Lorraine arrived. She came into the yard without asking or knocking, and went straight to where the crew had been digging. She covered the cap with soil, pushing dirt over it with her shoe, and told the workers to leave. She told them the shrubs had been an HOA-approved drainage barrier, and that removing them was interfering with association property. That was not true, and Marcus and the crew knew it, but Lorraine wore her pressed white blouse and gold badge, and spoke the way she always spoke, like an authority delivering a decision, and the crew packed up and left.
A week later the first violation notice arrived: "Unauthorized excavation near protected ground." Marcus read it twice and could not make sense of it. He had not excavated anything, only cleared dead shrubs from his own flower bed. But the notice was official, on association letterhead, and carried a fine warning, and it was only the beginning.
After that, the complaints came one after another, each one following something Lorraine had placed in his yard. Standing water, after a cracked bottle appeared near the shed. Rodent activity, after a dead rat turned up beside the fence. Unsafe composting, after wet cardboard appeared beneath the deck. Soil erosion. Chemical odor. Improper storage. Each complaint arrived with photographs taken by Lorraine, and each time she arrived with the photographs first, before Marcus even knew there was a complaint, and described him to the association as careless, defensive, uncooperative. She was always first, always prepared, always calm.
Cole looked up from the folder. "Three reports," she said, tapping the incident numbers. "You reported her entering without permission three times."
"Three times that I could prove," Marcus said. "There were more times I couldn't."
He told her about the neighbors, or rather about the absence of them. Marcus had lived in Rosewood Hills for only nine months. He had spent much of his childhood in this house, at Celia's, but he had moved away for college and returned only during holidays, and then only briefly, and the neighborhood had changed around the house while he was gone. The people on his street barely knew him. They knew Lorraine. She had been there for years, she ran the safety committee, she wore the badge, and when she said a new homeowner was a problem, they believed her, because believing her was easier than checking. Marcus was the stranger. Lorraine was the institution.
And the house itself was part of it. He had inherited it from Celia when she died, and inheriting a house from a beloved aunt sounds simple until you try to live in it. The house was full of her. The garden was full of her. When he moved in, the beds were overgrown and the wooden borders had collapsed, and the whole backyard looked like a place that had been loved and then left alone. Restoring it became part of grieving her. Each Saturday he cleared another section, and each Saturday he found another of her labels, written in her handwriting on small wooden stakes and faded plastic tags: Yellow roses. Summer herbs. Do not move the peonies. He followed them like instructions, and slowly the garden came back, and slowly the grief changed shape, from something sharp into something he could carry while he worked.