The first thing I noticed that morning was the water. At first I thought a hard wind had reached the pond ahead of the weather forecast, because the entire surface was moving in overlapping rings.
Then I saw that the cattails were perfectly still, and the pine branches above the eastern bank were not shifting at all. Something was moving beneath the water, and there was far too much of it.
Fish crowded the shallows in a way I had never seen in more than twenty years of living on that land. Dark backs crossed under silver flashes, tails beat against one another, and the quiet cove beside my dock looked as if somebody had set an enormous pot to boiling. A trout surfaced, opened its mouth, and disappeared under three others. I watched a bass push through the confusion, then turn sharply when it found no room to move.
My name is Robert Hayes. I was sixty-eight years old that spring, and I had owned the mountain property outside Silver Ridge Estates for just over two decades. I knew my pond the way some men know the sound of their own front door. I knew where the spring entered beneath the northern ledge, where the water stayed cold even in August, and where the bass held under the fallen cottonwood near the west bank.
I knew that no natural spawning season could fill seven acres with thousands of unfamiliar fish overnight. I knew somebody had been on my property, because the padlock at the access gate had fresh scratches around its hasp. I knew there were tire tracks in the damp ground near the service road, wider and deeper than the marks left by the county's occasional drainage truck. What I did not know was who had done it or why.
Then an engine sounded behind me. A pearl-white SUV rolled to a stop beside my pickup, and Karen Whitmore stepped out wearing pressed trousers, a cream-colored jacket, and the satisfied expression of a woman arriving to collect applause. She was president of the Silver Ridge Estates homeowners association, a position she treated as if it carried authority over every tree, ditch, driveway, and person within sight of the neighborhood's stone entrance sign. She walked toward the bank without looking at the distressed fish. Instead, she smiled at me as though she had just completed a favor I was too slow to appreciate.
"Problem solved," she announced.
I looked from her to the water. "What problem?"
"The fish," she said. "Silver Ridge needed somewhere to put them. Your pond is a much better location."
For a moment I could only stare at her. She reached into a leather folder, took out an invoice, and extended it to me with two fingers. Across the top were the words MOUNTAIN AQUATIC SERVICES, followed by a description of an emergency fish relocation and habitat-management operation. At the bottom was a balance due of $4,800, with my name and property address entered as the customer.
"You put those fish in my pond without asking me," I said, "and now you expect me to pay you for it?"