"We don't know who called yet," I said. It was true, technically. We had seen Karen watching. We had not seen her dial. "But we're going to find out, calmly, and we're going to make sure it doesn't happen again. That's Mom and Dad's job. Your job is to be a kid, and to tell us if you feel scared or worried, so we can help."
Jordan nodded, but he did not look convinced. Mia crawled into my lap, though she is almost too big for laps, and she stayed there until her breathing slowed.
After the children were in bed β Mia with her night-light on twice as bright as usual, Jordan with his door cracked open instead of closed β Marcus and I sat at the kitchen table with the patio lights off and the house quiet. The jazz speaker was silent. The grill was cold.
"Laura," Marcus said, "that folder had Meridian's logo on it."
"I know," I said. "I saw it."
"I haven't brought a Meridian folder home in months. Everything is digital now. We don't use manila folders with the logo except for β"
"Except for what?"
"Except for bid packets and personnel files that get printed for review meetings. The old stock. The ones they keep in the locked cabinet on the fourth floor."
He stood and walked to the window. Across the street, Karen's house was dark except for a single upstairs light.
"Someone gave her something from my office," he said. "Or she took it. Or someone who wants something from me gave it to her to hold up like a flag."
"Why would a neighbor hold it while police are in our yard?" I asked.
"To make sure I saw it," Marcus said. "Or to make sure you saw it. It wasn't about the barbecue, Laura. The barbecue was the stage. The folder was the message."
We sat with that until midnight. I made tea I did not drink. Marcus made a list, because Marcus makes lists when he does not know what else to do. At the top he wrote: FOLDER. Under it: Who had access? What was printed? Why Karen? Why now? Why a 911 call about a gun?
At the bottom, in his neat engineer's hand, he wrote: Document everything. Do not confront alone. Do not guess in writing.
It was the first page of what would become our record. In the ER, we say: if it isn't charted, it didn't happen. Marcus was about to learn to chart his own life the same way.
The First Three Weeks
The next morning, I tried to reconstruct the three weeks since Karen and Richard had arrived, the way I reconstruct a patient's history in triage β not from what I assumed, but from what I actually observed, in order.
Week one: The moving truck. The white pants. The sealed boxes. A new mailbox, brass, installed on the second day. A landscaper, twice. Karen walking the street in the morning with a coffee cup, looking at houses the way a real estate agent looks at comps, not the way a neighbor looks at a morning.
Week two: A dinner party, or what looked like one. Cars in the driveway on a Friday night, men in suits, voices low on the porch. Richard standing by the grill β their grill β talking to a man I did not recognize, gesturing with a beer bottle. Karen inside, laughing, too loud for the room. I had thought, at the time, that they were settling in. Now I wondered who those men were.
Week two, also: Karen stopped me at the mailbox. She asked about the schools, about the HOA, about "how things work around here." She asked, specifically, whether Marcus worked from home. I said no, he works at Meridian, downtown. She repeated the name slowly. "Meridian Design Group," she said. "I've heard of them." I thought she meant she had heard of the firm in general. Now I thought she had heard of Marcus.
Week three: Karen began walking past our house at the same time every afternoon, around four. Not walking for exercise β walking slowly, looking. She looked at the patio. She looked at the grill. She looked at the children's bicycle. On Thursday of that week, she stopped and asked Mia, who was drawing with chalk on the driveway, what time we usually had dinner on Saturdays.
Mia, who tells the truth to everyone, said, "Saturdays we barbecue if Daddy's home!"
Karen smiled. "How lovely," she said.
On Saturday, she called 911.
When I laid it out like that, in order, it did not look like a misunderstanding. It looked like reconnaissance. A person does not ask a seven-year-old about Saturday barbecue times by accident and then call police during a Saturday barbecue by coincidence.