"All right," she said to the empty street, and raised her mug like a small toast. "Let us try this again tomorrow."
Chapter Three
The Guardian Behind the Blinds
Three houses down, behind plantation blinds drawn to a careful angle, Carol Hastings was already on duty.
Her living room window gave her a field of view that covered the bend of Oakleaf Drive, four front yards, two driveways, and the whole of the Whitaker porch. She had arranged the blinds years ago, slat by slat, to admit light without surrendering privacy, and she considered the result one of the finer pieces of engineering in Hawthorne Hills. From her chair she could monitor the street the way a lighthouse monitors a coast. Little that moved on Oakleaf Drive moved unobserved.
Carol was the self appointed guardian of the subdivision, and she wore the office the way other people wore religion. She chaired the neighborhood watch. She maintained the community app with the diligence of an intelligence service, approving posts, flagging violations, and keeping a private file of infractions that ranged from unapproved mailbox paint to a basketball hoop left up three nights running. Her reports to the association board were famous for their thoroughness and dreaded for their length. In her own mind, Hawthorne Hills was not kept beautiful by landscapers and bylaws. It was kept beautiful by vigilance, and vigilance had a name, and the name was Carol Hastings.
She had watched the Whitaker house closely since the sale. A property like that, gone for over a million dollars, was not merely a home. It was a standard. She had noted the moving truck on closing day, the absence of curtains for a week, the irregular hours, the dark windows on nights when a respectable house should have glowed. New owners who kept to themselves made her uneasy. New owners she had not been introduced to made her more than uneasy. They made her feel the neighborhood slipping its leash.
At a quarter past eight, movement on the Whitaker porch drew her eye the way it always did, and she leaned closer to the blinds.
A woman stood at the top of the porch steps. A stranger, as far as Carol was concerned. She wore a worn hoodie with faded letters, loose sweatpants, slippers that looked like something pulled from a laundry basket. Her hair was piled up carelessly. She held a mug and bent over a plant with the unhurried ease of someone inspecting property she had no business inspecting. She looked, to Carol's practiced eye, completely out of place. She did not look like a woman who had paid over a million dollars for a mid century modern house. She did not look like the new owners Carol had imagined at all, and if she was not the new owner, then she was something the watch existed to catch.
The real owners had just bought the place. Everyone knew that. A woman like this, casing the front of the house in plain view, might be memorizing the layout for someone else. Might be testing whether the house stood empty. Criminals, Carol knew from the app and from programs she trusted, were bolder than they used to be.
She did not walk over. Walking over was for social calls, and this was not a social call. She did not wave, or call out, or give the woman any chance to explain herself, because explanations were exactly what suspicious people were best at. Instead she reached for her smartphone with the smooth certainty of a woman who had rehearsed this moment in smaller ways a hundred times.
She dialed 911 and arranged her voice into the breathless, frantic register she believed an emergency required.
"Yes, dispatch. I need police at 4420 Oakleaf Drive immediately." A gasp, measured but effective. "There is a suspicious individual lurking on the front porch. She looks completely out of place, unkempt, and I think she might be casing the property, or trying to break in."
She watched the porch through the blinds as she spoke, and her certainty grew with every word, the way certainty does when nobody interrupts it.
"The new owners just bought it," she said, "and this woman is definitely not them."
She gave her name and address with the pride of a citizen doing her part. She answered the dispatcher's questions by expanding her suspicions into facts, because in her mind the distance between the two had never been very large. When she ended the call, she did not sit back. She stayed at the window, one finger resting on the edge of a blind slat, and settled in to watch her neighborhood being defended.
Help was coming. Carol Hastings had seen to that. It did not occur to her, not even slightly, that help was the thing the woman on the porch was going to need protection from, or that the voice she had just performed for dispatch would be replayed one day to people who would judge it very differently than she judged it herself.