trusted shortcuts. The engine still needed one final adjustment. Dez set his socket wrench on a padded cloth, leaned over the fender, and listened to a distant lawn mower turning in the next block. For the first time that week, the quiet inside his head felt almost like the quiet outside the house.
Across the street, Loretta Voss watched him through the curtain of her front window. Loretta was sixty-eight and had lived in the neighborhood since the era when residents borrowed sugar from one another and children rode bicycles without helmets. She missed that version of Oak Haven, although her memory of it had become increasingly selective. She now managed the neighborhood watch email list and considered herself responsible for keeping track of every moving van, unfamiliar truck, and new face. Her front room was filled with porcelain birds, framed family portraits, and the sharp fragrance of lemon furniture polish.
Loretta had seen the sale sign come down from the old Henderson property. She had not attended the closing, met the buyer, or asked the real-estate agent who had purchased it. In the absence of facts, she had supplied a story of her own. The man in the driveway was broad-shouldered, Black, tattooed, and dressed in cargo pants. His truck was unfamiliar; his hands were dirty; he was working with tools beside a beautiful old car. Loretta treated those ordinary observations as proof that something was wrong.
She lifted her telephone and dialed 911 rather than walking across the street. The dispatcher asked whether the man was threatening anyone, breaking a window, or attempting to force a door. Loretta glanced out again. Dez had lowered his head beneath the hood and was singing quietly to himself.
"I can't tell what he's doing," she admitted before correcting herself. "He's stripping a car at the Henderson place. He doesn't look like he belongs there. Please send somebody before he takes anything." The dispatcher recorded her claim as a possible property crime in progress.
Loretta did not consciously tell herself that she was lying. She believed that instinct and experience gave her the right to skip the questions she should have asked. She had once reported a moving crew because they arrived before dawn, even though the owners had hired them. She had reported a delivery driver for sitting at the curb too long, only to learn he was checking an address. Each false alarm was easily forgotten. Each occasion when police thanked her for calling reinforced her conviction that suspicion was the same thing as vigilance.