Then came the complaint pages, each one with its own photograph and its own date, and Marcus read them in order the way Cole had, and the pattern stood out so clearly that he wondered how he had ever doubted it. The standing water complaint, with a photograph of a puddle near the shed, and beside it, in his own handwriting on the back of the page, a note he had written at the time: cracked bottle found near shed, not mine. He remembered finding that bottle, green glass with a jagged neck, sitting upright against the shed wall where no bottle of his had ever been, and he remembered thinking it was odd and then forgetting about it, because a single odd thing is easy to forget. The rodent activity complaint, with a photograph of a dead rat beside the fence, and his note: rat beside fence, not from my yard, no traps set. He remembered that morning too, the rat lying stiff in the grass near the fence line, and the way Lorraine had arrived twenty minutes later with her camera already out, as if she had known it would be there. The unsafe composting complaint, with a photograph of wet cardboard beneath the deck, and his note: cardboard under deck, not mine, deck never used for compost. He had never composted anything in his life. Celia had, in a bin behind the shed, years ago, but Marcus had not touched that bin, and the cardboard under the deck was fresh, still damp from a recent rain, not the old flattened stuff of a real compost pile.
Each complaint had followed the same choreography. Something appeared in his yard that he had not put there. Lorraine arrived with photographs before he had time to notice it himself, or before he had time to understand what it meant. Then the notice arrived, and then the fine warning, and then Lorraine would appear at his door or at the fence, calm and prepared, to explain that the association was concerned, that the neighbors were concerned, that he was being careless and defensive and uncooperative. The words were always the same three, and Marcus had come to hate them in a particular way, because they were not descriptions of his behavior. They were a script. Careless, for the man who spent every Saturday on his knees in the garden. Defensive, for the man who asked why a complaint had been filed before he was told about it. Uncooperative, for the man who refused to let a neighbor with a badge walk through his yard without permission. The words were designed to make his objections sound like symptoms, and for months they had worked, at least on the people who did not know him.
The neighbors were the hardest part to think about, and Marcus tried not to think about them too long, because thinking about them made him angry in a way that was not useful. He had lived in the house for nine months, and in nine months he had learned the names of perhaps six people on his street, and he had had real conversations with perhaps two of them. The rest knew him as the man who had inherited Celia's house, the man who was sometimes out in the yard on Saturdays, the man Lorraine talked about at meetings. He had spent his childhood in this house, running through these same rooms, eating at Celia's table, sleeping in the back bedroom with the window that looked over the garden, but childhood does not count as residency, and the neighborhood had turned over while he was away at college and then away building a life elsewhere. The people who remembered Celia remembered a sweet old woman with a beautiful garden. They did not remember the boy who had visited her, because the boy had grown up and left, and the man who came back was a stranger with her house and her garden and her name on a deed. Lorraine had been there the whole time, or at least she had been there long enough to become the person people called when something went wrong, and when she said the stranger was a problem, people nodded, because nodding was easier than investigating, and because Lorraine never raised her voice, never lost her temper, never gave anyone a reason to doubt her composure.