Chapter 3
The patrol car arrived within twenty minutes, which was fast for a boundary complaint on a quiet morning, and I noticed that before I noticed anything else. Officer Tom Callahan stepped out of the cruiser with the unhurried confidence of a man who had walked this yard before, and Margaret met him halfway across the lawn as if she had been expecting him, not just calling him. She spoke first, and she spoke quickly, pointing at my string line and my holes and telling him I was building on her land and refusing to stop.
Callahan listened, nodded, and walked the fence line with his hands on his belt, looking at my holes the way a man looks at work he does not intend to praise. He asked me for the plat, and I handed it over, and he studied it for a long moment before folding it and handing it back without a word about what it showed. Then he stepped toward the fourth hole, the one where I had found the pin, and his boot caught on something in the mud at the edge of the spoil pile.
He stopped. He bent down. He pulled at a strip of black tape that was half-buried in the wet earth, and the tape came up with something attached to it: a laminated card, face-down, sealed in heavy laminate that had gone cloudy at the edges from years underground. The tape had bound it tight, and the mud had preserved it the way mud preserves things people mean to forget. Callahan turned it over slowly, and I saw the seal stamped into the laminate before I saw anything else: the county medical examiner's evidence lockup seal, pressed into the plastic like a brand.
Margaret went very still. She had been talking the whole time Callahan was walking the line, and the moment that card came out of the mud, she stopped talking entirely. Her hands, which had been gesturing at my string line a moment before, dropped to her sides, and she stared at the laminated card the way a person stares at a photograph of someone they thought they would never see again. It was not the reaction of a woman looking at old rubbish from a storm. It was the reaction of a woman looking at something she recognized, and wished she did not. Callahan held the card up, wiped the mud off it with his thumb, and read the front of it in silence. His face did not change, but his shoulders did, a small tightening that I would not have noticed if I had not been watching him closely. A police officer finding a medical examiner's evidence card buried in a neighbor's yard should have looked surprised. Callahan looked like a man who had found something he already knew was there.
"What is that doing here?" I asked, and my voice sounded louder than I meant it to.
Callahan did not answer me directly. He slipped the card into an evidence pouch from his belt, sealed it, and said the card would have to be logged, and that nobody was to dig any further along the fence until the matter was clarified. Margaret found her voice again then, and she said the card was probably old rubbish from the storm, washed down from somewhere, and that it had nothing to do with her property or mine. But her hands were shaking when she said it, and she kept glancing at the fourth hole, at the place where the pin lay buried under a thin layer of soil I had pushed back over it.
I looked at Callahan, and Callahan looked at Margaret, and in that look there was something I did not understand yet but recognized as wrong: not the look of an officer questioning a witness, but the look of two people checking whether the other one is going to hold the line. I noticed, too, that Callahan had parked his cruiser at the curb in front of Margaret's house rather than mine, though I was the one whose fence was in dispute, and that he had walked straight to the fourth hole without asking me where the boundary was. A responding officer who has never been to a property asks where things are. Callahan had not asked a single question about the layout of the yard. He had moved through it like a man following a map he had already memorized.
The fence, the pin, the four inches of lawn β all of it suddenly felt like a cover for something else, something that had been buried in this yard long before I arrived, and that card in the mud was the first corner of it showing through.