I have been questioned by police officers before, as a witness at an accident and once after a burglar alarm sounded in a building where I worked late. Neither experience had bothered me very much. A deputy asking a stranger to identify himself is not, by itself, a tragedy. But this time someone had watched a man unload kitchen towels on a Sunday and deliberately described the act as casing a vacant house. That was a different proposition.
I did not follow the woman next door. I did not demand that the deputy come back and take a statement. I picked up the towels and carried them into the kitchen, which still smelled of paint and empty cupboards. The day was too bright and too hot to spend arguing across a fence with a person whose name I did not know. There were pans to put away, a refrigerator to wipe out, and an old box of books I had been promising myself to unpack for six years.
Moving, I have always believed, is a form of excavation. Every box reminds you of a version of yourself you once considered permanent. In one I found the blue mug a former colleague had given me after my first trial. In another were three neckties my father had worn, folded with the care of a man who had meant to give them away but could not. Beneath the books was a framed photograph of my parents on a lake dock, the light behind them turning their faces into outlines. I set that photograph on the kitchen counter and left the other things for later.
The house was quieter than I expected. An empty home makes small sounds significant: the compressor of a refrigerator, a pipe settling after a faucet has run, the scuff of a shoe on tile. At three in the afternoon I went outside for another box and noticed a face behind the curtains of the house opposite mine. At four there were three. At five, four separate windows held people who turned away as soon as I looked directly at them.
Nobody came over to introduce themselves. In a neighborhood like this, where each front yard was framed with decorative stone and carefully edged mulch, I would have expected at least one person to appear with a plate of cookies or a question about where I had moved from. Instead, I had the peculiar sensation of moving into a house whose neighbors had already discussed me and reached a conclusion. I told myself that I was imagining it. After a long career listening to people accuse one another, a man can become too alert to hostility.
At dusk, while I sat on an unopened carton in the living room eating a sandwich from its wrapper, I heard a garage door motor start somewhere nearby. The sound was close enough that I looked up. A moment later came the familiar heavy rattle of a door lowering against its weather seal. I assumed it belonged to the woman next door, and because I had no reason to think otherwise, I returned to my sandwich.
The next morning, I learned her name.