"Good morning, officer," Naomi said. "Can I help you?"
He did not return the greeting. His eyes moved over her scarf, her bare face, her damp slippers, the old gardening gloves tucked into her back pocket. Then he looked at the house behind her, the porch, the brass numbers by the door, the clean windows. He stared at all of it like the property itself should rise up and contradict her.
"What are you doing here?" he said.
Naomi glanced at the roses, then at the hose in her hand. "Watering my garden."
"Your garden?"
"Yes."
"This your residence?"
"It is."
He took another step onto the grass, close enough that she could see the creases around his mouth, the particular set of a man accustomed to being obeyed. "Who exactly pays for a house like this?"
The question did not sound like curiosity. It sounded like a verdict.
Naomi felt her fingers tighten around the hose, and she made herself loosen them, one finger at a time. She had spent twenty years in courtrooms learning that the first person to show anger lost the room. This was not a courtroom, but the principle held.
"This is my home," she said.
He laughed.
That laugh was worse than the accusation. It was not surprise. It was dismissal, the kind of laugh a person gives when they have already decided that facts are just decorations around what they prefer to believe. Naomi had heard that laugh before, in depositions and settlement conferences, usually from men who discovered too late that the quiet woman across the table had been keeping score.
"Your home?" he said. "Lady, don't waste my morning."
Something cold and precise settled in Naomi's chest. She set the hose down carefully on the grass beside the rose bed, buying herself three seconds of composure. When she straightened, her voice was even.
"Officer," she said, "I have answered your questions. Now I have one for you. On what legal basis are you standing on my property demanding to know who pays for my house?"
His mouth tightened. People like him were comfortable asking questions. They were less comfortable being asked for the authority behind them, especially by a woman he had already placed in a lower category in his mind.
Naomi watched the calculation move behind his eyes. He was deciding whether to answer her or to punish her for asking, and she could see the moment punishment started winning. She had seen that exact look on the faces of opposing counsel right before they made the mistake that lost them the case.
"We've had issues in this neighborhood," he said.
It was the answer of a man reaching for a shelf he had never stocked. Naomi let the silence sit for one beat, then two, the way she let witnesses sit in the box until their certainty started to fray.
"I see," she said. "And I am one of those issues?"
From the curb, the younger officer shifted his weight. Naomi caught the movement from the corner of her eye and filed it away. Fear had a posture, and his shoulders were wearing it.
The big officer's jaw worked. "I'm going to need ID."
Naomi's expression did not change. "You crossed onto my property. I am standing in my own yard, watering my own roses, on a Saturday morning. Before I produce identification, I am asking what reasonable suspicion you have that I committed a crime."
"Excuse me?"
"You heard me."
For a moment, nobody moved. A bee worked the hydrangeas along the front path, oblivious. Somewhere down the street, a car door closed. Naomi stood barefoot in the damp grass and waited, patient as a judge, while the man with the badge tried to remember the last time someone had asked him to justify himself and found that he could not.
Chapter Eight
Your Garden
"We've had issues in this neighborhood," Holt said, as if the sentence were a door he could close between them.
Naomi looked at him for a long moment. Then she looked, deliberately, at the garden.
The roses were wet and bright along the front path. The hydrangeas nodded over the white border. Her legal folder lay open near the porch steps, a ceramic coffee mug weighting the pages against the breeze. A pair of pruning shears rested on the soil where she had set them down an hour ago, when the morning had still belonged to her.
"What issues?" Naomi asked.
Holt's eyes flicked toward the folder, the mug, the shears, as if the ordinary objects of a Saturday morning might rearrange themselves into evidence if he stared hard enough.
"Suspicious people," he said.
"What suspicious behavior did you observe?"