She looked past me toward the backyard, visible through the kitchen window, and said it was a shame for such a large pool to go underused. Then she left without waiting for an answer. I watched her cross the driveway and disappear into her house. Her last observation was revealing: she was evaluating my pool according to how much enjoyment other people could extract from it. My enjoyment, my costs, and my right to decide whether the pool was being used sufficiently did not enter the calculation.
I closed my front door and believed, one last time, that a direct refusal would be enough. By the end of the following month, I would be repairing damage to the fence. By June, I would be checking chemical readings against travel dates. By July, four cameras would be recording everything that happened around the water. And by the time Sandra brought police officers to my front door, I would have accumulated a file comprehensive enough to tell the story without requiring anybody to take my word for it.
The first loosened fence board appeared in late May, after three days of rain and a weekend of bright weather. I noticed it while collecting fallen leaves from the patio. The fence between our houses ran behind a row of shrubs, its boards fixed vertically to horizontal rails supported by older wooden posts. One board near the deep end had moved inward by several inches. At first I thought the rain had weakened the fasteners, but when I looked closer I saw that two nails had been pulled outward from the rail. A second board beside it moved when I placed my hand against it.
Wood deteriorates. I know that, and I had no reason to believe every ordinary repair was evidence of a plot. I took a photograph so I could show it to a carpenter if necessary, then pushed the boards back into place and secured them with longer exterior screws. I marked the new screw positions on a rough sketch of the fence and checked the gap from the other side of my yard. When the boards were fixed, the space between them was barely visible. I felt satisfied with the repair and thought no more about it until the following week.
On Tuesday evening I noticed fresh splinters on the patio-side ground. They were scattered beneath the same boards I had repaired. A screw was bent, and the wood around the fastener had torn in a pattern that did not resemble gradual decay. It looked as though the board had been pushed or levered away from the rail. I photographed the damage again, this time placing a ruler beside the split wood. It was an instinctive choice, the same impulse that made me record dimensions before ordering replacement equipment for my office.
I did not knock on Sandra's door immediately. I wanted to know whether the fence had been damaged by accident, by a child, by somebody cutting through the yard, or by repeated pressure from the other side. Without evidence, I would have been presenting suspicion as fact.