After Delgado drove Grace away, Mia and I sat at the kitchen table and I told her about the part I had not understood. She had asked Grace why, and Grace had not answered her β she had answered me, and only about the camera. There was a whole other conversation hiding behind it, and I could feel its shape without being able to see it.
Mia found Grace's number in my phone and called the station. They said Grace was being held for questioning and no, a family member could not speak to her yet. Mia hung up and put her head down on the table.
"She's lying, isn't she?" she said into her arms. "There's no camera. People don't put cameras under solar panels."
"I don't know what there is," I said.
"You believe her a little."
"I don't want to believe her at all. That's not the same as not believing her."
An hour later, Delgado's cruiser pulled back into the driveway. The officer got out holding a manila folder and came to the door. Mia opened it before I could.
"Can I see Mrs. Thornton?" she asked.
"Not yet." Delgado stepped inside. "Mr. Mercer, she asked me to bring you something. She said you would want to hear the whole thing before you decide what kind of person she is."
She opened the folder. Inside were printouts β pages of lined paper, photographed and printed, in Grace's narrow handwriting. Dates across the top of each page. Signal logs. Times. Arrows. Notes in the margins like "same pattern as tues" and "burst 3.2 sec."
"She gave a statement," Delgado said. "It took two hours. I'm going to summarize it for you, and then you're going to decide whether any of it deserves a second look."
According to the statement, Grace had noticed a small reflection beneath panel number six eight weeks ago β a glint where the mounting bracket met the frame, the kind of thing you only see from a certain angle at a certain hour. Before she retired, Grace had spent thirty-four years as a communications technician for a regional telephone company. She had repaired relay systems and spent a good part of her career finding unauthorized signals β taps, intercepts, equipment that did not belong.
"She knows that world," Delgado said. "Her employment record checks out. Her old supervisor remembered her by name."
Grace had started watching the roof at night. She said she began detecting short wireless transmissions coming from my roof β brief bursts, encrypted, running through a cellular relay. The signal only activated when the solar array reached a certain output level. And every afternoon between three and five, she logged a steady pattern of data moving out through that relay.
"She has eight weeks of logs," Delgado said, tapping the folder. "Meticulous. I had our communications guy glance at them. He said β and I quote β 'either she's brilliant or she's committed to the bit.'"
Grace had reported it to SunHarvest Energy. A technician β Travis Cole β arrived within twenty minutes. Grace told Delgado she watched from her window as he climbed the roof with his tools. By the time the police inspected the roof the next day, there was nothing suspicious anywhere. The transmissions, Grace said, returned the following afternoon at three o'clock sharp.
"So she started damaging the panels," I said.
"To reduce the output below whatever level the transmitter needed. She said the first three incidents each bought her a few days of silence. SunHarvest kept repairing the system, and each repair brought the signal back."
Mia looked up. "That's why she kept doing it? To shut it down?"
"That's her claim." Delgado turned a page. "She also says she tried to warn you. Twice she put handwritten notes in your mailbox. Three emails. And one time she knocked on your door while you were at work, and the SunHarvest technician who was inside updating your inverter told her you did not want to speak with her."
I stared at her. "I never got any notes. I never got any emails. And I never told anyone to turn Grace away."
"I believe you," Delgado said. "The emails are in your spam folder right now β she showed me the timestamps on her phone. Three of them. All flagged as spam within seconds of sending, which is unusual for a residential address you've emailed before." She paused. "She says she has emailed you before, about the tomatoes."
"She has," I said quietly. "Every August. 'Tomatoes on the porch.'"
"And the mailbox notes?" Mia asked.
"Gone," Delgado said. "She says she placed them herself, in the morning, and by evening they were gone. She never saw you take them."
Mia and I looked at each other. Someone had been taking mail out of our box. Someone had been filtering Grace's emails before I ever saw them. Someone had stood in my house, in front of my inverter, and told a seventy-one-year-old woman that I did not want to speak with her.
"Where is Travis Cole now?" I asked.
Delgado closed the folder. "That is the next question I intend to answer."