Chapter 3: The Complaint
The township offices occupied the ground floor of the old grange hall out on Route 8, behind a door that stuck in damp weather and a counter worn smooth by forty years of forearms. Donna Pruitt arrived on a Thursday morning in October with a folder. She had dressed the way she dressed for anything official, in a pressed blouse and her good jacket, and she had organized the folder the way she organized everything: chronologically, with tabs.
The clerk, Marla, had known Donna for years in the way of small-town clerks, which is to say she knew her handwriting, her signature, her filing habits, and the precise tone Donna used when she said the words I'd like this on record. Marla got out the complaint form and a fresh pen.
There were three complaints, and Donna made them in order. The first was the fence: section and paragraph of the township ordinance, height of fences in residential zones, six feet being the maximum and Amos Keller's fence being, by her measurement with Steve's tape on a Sunday morning, six feet and two and a quarter inches on the level ground by the gate. The second was noise: machinery operated after hours, a documented pattern, dates and times attached, a violation of the quiet-hours provision plain and simple. Marla wrote it all down in her neat clerk's hand, because that was the job. The third complaint Donna delivered more slowly, because it was the one she actually cared about, and she wanted it entered exactly.
Her electric bill had risen. Not a little. Steve was away and the house used what it used β the same lights, the same furnace fan, the same everything β and the bill had gone up by a third since spring, and a third again the month after. She had called the power company and the power company had told her, in the patient voice of a woman reading from a card, that usage was usage. So Donna had done what Donna did. She had read. And she had learned that a man with a locked shed full of machinery, running it all night on a quiet street, could very easily be running some of it on somebody else's line, the way people tapped cable in the old days, the way a man who'd spent his life inside industrial plants would know how to do in his sleep. She had underlined that part twice. She pointed out β and Marla wrote it down β that Amos Keller's own meter sat on the far side of his house, where nobody on the court ever saw it read, and that the meter reader had lingered, and gone around back, and written something down.
"I am not accusing him," Donna said, in the tone of a woman accusing him. "I am asking the township to look."
Marla stamped the forms and gave her the copies and told her, honestly, what would happen: the fence would be measured by the zoning officer when he was next out that way; the noise complaint would go to the sheriff's office, since quiet-hours enforcement was theirs; and as for the power β well. The sheriff's office would probably want to send somebody out to talk to everybody, because that was how these things went. Donna said that was all she had ever wanted. She put her copies in the folder, aligned the folder with the edge of the counter out of habit, and drove home under a sky the color of wet newspaper.
Word traveled Larkspur Court the way it always traveled, which was through the Almeidas' daughter, who worked part-time at the township hall answering phones. By Friday evening, Pete Almeida had carried the news down the court while walking his dog, disguising it as conversation, and by Saturday morning Amos knew β if the whole street's careful behavior hadn't told him β that complaints had been filed, and roughly what they said. Mrs. Sorensen brought it up over the fence while he was splitting wood, apologetic, furious on his behalf, offering twice to call Marla herself and give her an earful. Amos listened the way he listened to weather reports. Then he set another log on the block.
"She's within her rights," he said. It was the longest sentence anyone got out of him on the subject. He did not ask what exactly the complaints alleged. He did not defend the fence, or the noise, or himself. He split the log, and the next, and stacked them against the shed wall with the bark all facing one way, the way he stacked everything. That night the hum ran from a little after eleven until nearly two, low and even, and Donna, awake in the dark at number nine, wrote down the times in the notebook with a hand that was not entirely steady β though whether from anger or from something else, she would not have been able to say.
Chapter 4: The Deputies