Chapter 2
Margaret Hale came out of her back door before I had finished the fifth hole. I heard the screen door slap shut, and then her voice carried across the yard, sharp and practiced, the way someone sounds when they have rehearsed a complaint before delivering it.
"You are past the setback," she said. "That fence is going up on my side of the line."
I stood up, wiped my hands on my jeans, and told her I was digging on my own side, following the old fence line, and that the code setback was four feet off the pin. I said it calmly, the way you talk to someone you hope to live next to for a long time. She did not calm down. She walked to the fence line in her garden shoes, pointed at my string line, and said the string was wrong, the plat was wrong, and I was the third person in as many years to try to move a fence onto her property.
I tried to show her the plat drawing. She did not look at it. She said she had lived in that house for decades, that she knew where her land ended, and that no piece of paper folded in a stranger's pocket was going to tell her otherwise. When I mentioned the survey pin I had found, her face changed in a way I could not quite read. It was not surprise. It was something tighter, like a person who has heard a word they hoped never to hear again. She said survey pins were unreliable, that the township had pulled most of them after the storm, and that anyone who trusted a pin in this neighborhood was asking for trouble.
"I'm calling the police," she said, and she meant it. She took her phone out of her apron pocket and held it up so I could see she was serious.
I told her that seemed like a large step for four inches of lawn, and that we could hire a surveyor together and split the cost, which is what reasonable neighbors do. She said she did not need a surveyor to know her own yard, and that I had been digging since early morning without so much as asking her permission, which was not true, because I had knocked on her door the week before to tell her about the fence and she had not answered. I did not say that. I said I was happy to stop work until we sorted it out, and I set my spade down to show good faith.
She did not put her phone away. She walked back toward her house, already dialing, and called over her shoulder that the police would sort out who owned what. I watched her go, and I thought about the pin again, and about the way her face had tightened when I mentioned it. A woman who truly believes a pin is unreliable does not flinch at the mention of one. A woman who knows a pin has been moved does.
I sat on the stack of cedar boards and waited. While I waited, I thought about why I had come back to this town at all. I had lived four hundred miles away for years, and I had liquidated nearly everything I owned to buy this plot. People who heard the price assumed I was chasing a bargain, and I let them assume it, because the real reason was harder to explain to strangers. My younger brother had vanished from this county, and no one here had ever given me an answer that fit together. Buying a house on this street was the closest I could get to the place where his trail went cold, and I had told myself that living here might shake something loose. Sitting on those cedar boards, watching Margaret's curtain twitch at her kitchen window, I wondered for the first time whether the house had chosen me as much as I had chosen it.
The morning had started as a simple repair job, and it had turned into something else while I was not paying attention. I thought about the seven months I had lived in that house, about the quiet street, the neighbors who waved but did not stop, and the feeling I had carried since the day I moved in that people in this town knew something about my house that I did not. Margaret's phone call, whatever it brought, was at least going to bring someone official to the fence line, and I was starting to think that was exactly what I needed.