I took a pen from my pocket and wrote down the facts as she spoke. I told her I did not want to turn her into a witness without her consent, and that she was free to end the conversation. She said she had kept the paperwork precisely because she knew there would be another owner. She had tried to warn the listing agent when she sold. She did not know whether anyone had passed the warning along.
"People before me had trouble too," she said. "The Kowalskis lasted seven months. I met one of them once when she came back for a package. She said the same thing happened to them. There's a pattern."
I asked whether Linda still had photographs. She told me she had twenty-three, filed by date, and offered to email them. She also had copies of her notices and a letter she had written to the association asking for the documentary basis of the purported garage arrangement. Nobody had answered the letter. Before hanging up, she asked whether the neighbors were treating me kindly.
"No," I said.
"I am sorry. That was the worst part."
We both stayed on the line for a moment. I could hear a dog barking in the background of her house and a television playing faintly in another room. She was no longer living beneath Patricia's gaze, yet her voice changed when we spoke about Larks Lane. It tightened, became watchful, and then relaxed only when she asked about the weather somewhere else. I recognized the effect as more than irritation. Five months on that street had left a residue.
Her email arrived while I was at the courthouse.
The subject line read, simply, "You should see these." The first photograph showed my driveway several years earlier, the same tan motor home parked at precisely the same angle. The second showed the garage with the golf cart and plastic tubs. The third showed a calendar, not the current one but an earlier month, with the same blue handwriting organizing trips and collections. By the tenth photograph I was looking at a second version of my own first week in the house, except the person behind the camera had been Linda.
The final photographs were taken from the kitchen window into the backyard. A pallet of blue-green swimming-pool tile sat on the grass beside a cement mixer. There were stacks of pool coping stones and lengths of lumber near the shared fence. Beyond that fence Patricia's swimming pool was under renovation, the concrete deck broken out and a contractor in an orange vest standing near the edge. In the twenty-third photograph, Patricia was pointing to a place in Linda's backyard while the contractor looked down at the ground.
I returned to that photograph repeatedly. It was slightly out of focus because Linda had taken it through glass. The morning light washed out one corner, but there was no mistaking the people, the fence, or the direction of Patricia's gesture. She was telling the contractor where to put materials on land that did not belong to her, and Linda was evidently close enough to watch. Patricia had never behaved like someone hiding a temporary trespass. She behaved like someone giving instructions about a property she believed she could manage.