Celia herself was the reason Marcus could not simply walk away from the fight, and as he sat at the dining table with the folder open in front of him, he found himself thinking about her more clearly than he had in weeks. Celia had been the person who taught him that a garden is a kind of memory you can walk through. She had kept her labels in her own handwriting, on stakes and tags that faded a little more each year, and she had never replaced them, because replacing them would have meant admitting that the originals were gone. Yellow roses. Summer herbs. Do not move the peonies. He had found those labels one by one as he cleared the beds, and each one had felt like a message, not from a lawyer or an association, but from a woman who had loved a place and wanted it to outlast her. Restoring the garden had been his way of grieving, but it had also been his way of staying close to her, and Lorraine had understood that, or at least she had understood that the garden mattered to him, because she had chosen it as the place to hurt him. She had not dumped garbage on his car, or on his porch, or on his front lawn where the street could see it. She had dumped it on the flower bed, on Celia's roses and herbs and peonies, on the four months of Saturdays, on the grief itself. That choice was not random. It was aimed.
Cole's last words came back to him as he sat there: get checked by a doctor, do not confront her. He understood the advice, and he intended to follow it, because confronting Lorraine had never worked. Every confrontation became another scene for her camera, another entry in her file, another reason for her to describe him as aggressive. The morning had proved that. He had asked a simple question, "What are you doing?", and she had answered it by calling him aggressive and filming him, turning his shock into her evidence. He would not give her another scene. He would give her paperwork instead, and photographs, and incident numbers, and a folder that grew thicker every month, and he would let Cole and the people Cole called do what they did. That was a hard decision for a man who liked to fix things with his own hands, but the garden had taught him patience, and patience was the only tool he had that Lorraine had not already learned to use against him.
Late in the afternoon, Marcus walked the yard once more, slowly, along the patio edge and not through the garbage, and he looked at the rear corner where the cap lay under its thin cover of soil. He did not dig it up. He did not touch it. He just looked at the place where it was, and he thought about what Cole had photographed and what the utility companies had denied, and about the fact that a four-inch piece of stamped metal had set off months of complaints, notices, planted bottles, planted rats, planted cardboard, staged bags, and finally a bin full of rotting garbage tipped onto a man's shoulders on a Saturday morning. A piece of metal does not cause that kind of effort by accident. Somebody wanted that cap covered, and somebody wanted Marcus away from that corner of the yard, and somebody had been willing to spend months and risk a criminal charge to make it happen. Marcus did not know what was under his flower bed. He did not know why a four-inch cap mattered so much. But he knew, with a certainty that settled over him like the evening cooling the air, that the cap was the beginning of the answer, and that Lorraine's garbage had been designed to make sure he never looked for the rest of it. He would look anyway. He would look carefully, and he would look with other people beside him, and he would not stop at the surface this time, because the surface was where Lorraine wanted him to stay, and the truth, whatever it was, was underneath.