Officer Ruth Delgado arrived six minutes later, and Grace Thornton did not move.
The patrol car pulled into my driveway with its lights off β I heard it rather than saw it, the tires on the wet pavement, the door closing with a solid municipal thunk. Delgado came around the side of the house in a dark uniform, her hand resting near her belt, and looked up at the roof. She took in the twelve red panels, the paint can at Grace's foot, the ladder leaning against the gutter.
"Ma'am," Delgado called. "I need you to come down from there."
Grace nodded, as if she had been expecting exactly this. "I will. Give me one minute to make sure the paint is set."
"Now, please."
Grace capped the can, tucked it under her arm, and climbed down the ladder one rung at a time, her gardening gloves gripping the rails. When her boots hit the grass, Delgado stepped forward with the handcuffs.
"Grace Thornton, you are under arrest for criminal mischief and trespassing."
Grace held out her wrists. The cuffs clicked. She looked smaller on the ground than she had on the roof.
Mia stood in the driveway with her arms wrapped around herself, watching the cuffs go on. She looked at me, and I could see her trying to decide whether to cry or be angry, the way she had looked at Carla's funeral when she was fourteen and determined not to fall apart in front of people.
Delgado turned to me. "You are the homeowner?"
"Daniel Mercer. Yes."
"Did you see her do this?"
"My daughter and I both watched from the window."
"Did she say why?"
I almost laughed, because the question landed on everything I didn't understand. "She said β she told me she did the other three times too. The tar, the cut cables, the film. All of it."
Delgado made a note. Then she looked at Grace. "Ma'am, is that true? Did you damage these panels on four separate occasions?"
"Yes," Grace said.
"And why would you do that?"
Grace looked directly at me. Not at the officer. At me.
"Because there is a camera underneath panel number six."
I laughed. I could not help it β one short, surprised sound came out of me before I understood what she had said. It was such an absurd sentence. A camera. Underneath a solar panel. On my roof.
"My panels are on my roof," I said, which was the stupidest true thing I had ever said out loud.
"The camera is pointed at my house," Grace said.
Delgado's pen stopped moving. She looked from Grace to me and back again, the way cops do when a simple arrest is about to stop being simple.
"Ma'am, are you saying you destroyed this man's property because you believed there was a camera under his solar panel?"
"I don't believe it. I know it. I have known it for eight weeks." Grace lifted her chin. The cuffs made the gesture smaller, but the stubbornness was the same one I had watched her paint tomatoes with, season after season. "And if he turns those panels back on, I will do it again."
Delgado studied her face for a long moment. Then she turned to me.
"Mr. Mercer, have you ever had any work done under your panels? Any equipment installed you didn't order?"
"SunHarvest installed the system two years ago. That's it. Travis Cole, their technician, has been out four times for the repairs. He never mentioned any camera."
Grace made a sound that might have been a laugh or might have been something breaking.
"Travis Cole," she said. "Of course."
"Do you know him?" Delgado asked.
"I know that he came to my door once and told me Daniel did not want to speak with me." Grace looked at me again. "I never believed that. You have never once refused to speak to me, Daniel. Not in twenty years."
She was right. I had never refused her anything. And standing there in my driveway with a police officer writing in a notebook and my daughter shivering in a sweatshirt, I felt the ground under the morning shift in a way that had nothing to do with the red paint drying on my roof.
Delgado closed her notebook. "I'm going to take Mrs. Thornton in. Mr. Mercer, do not touch the panels or reset any equipment until we know what we are dealing with."
"What are we dealing with?" I asked.
Delgado glanced up at the red roof. "That," she said, "is what I'd like to find out."