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“How’s that?”

“Whole circle’s wired for video,” Roger said. “Sentinel provides the equipment, I maintain the feeds, do the backups there in the house.”

“So the other neighbors are aware of the cameras, then?”

“Aware of them?” Roger chuckled. “Hell, they pay for ‘em.”

Both cops looked at me. My head felt numb. I said, “No body told me anything about video cameras.”

“Paul, I just don’t know what to say.”

Roger was putting on a hell of a show. I looked at him.

“I figured you knew what you were signing.” He sighed. “I’m truly sorry. If you and Sara want your cameras down, we’ll get them right down.”

“Oh, I’ll bet.”

Just then, Melody Seward turned in to the circle in her Acura, on her way home from her shift at the bank. Her eyes widened as she drove around, passing me and two cops standing in Big Brother Mallory’s driveway. I thought back to one of the video files I’d scanned on his laptop. A Saturday night, only three weeks ago. On fast forward, it looked like Melody jogging over to our house, staying for an hour, then sprinting back to her house.

“I was even sorrier Heartland Realty wouldn’t let me get a feed up while your place was on the market,” Roger said. He gave Officers Bill and Stump the quick rundown of our break-in, then explained that the previous owners hadn’t wanted an alarm system from Sentinel, despite the neighborhood discount. “We’d had the cameras running that night, maybe we’d have caught the son of a bitch.” He looked at me as though daring me to keep going.
Anything else you want to add?

“This is incredible.” I turned to the cops, unable to stop myself. “He’s been going through our garbage, too.”

“Sir?”

“I found my credit card statement on his desk.” My voice seemed to be climbing in spite of my efforts to seem like the reasonable party here. “I tore it up last night, and he taped it back together again.”

The conversation went downhill from there. According to Roger, the raccoons had gotten into our trash. It had been windy overnight, and the litter had blown into his yard.

“I guess I probably stepped over the line a bit.” He put on a sheepish look. “I’ll admit that.”

The cops nodded along supportively, waiting to hear more.

“Paul,” Roger said, speaking to me, but framing his words for Officers Bill and Stump, “I was going to give that thing back to you and Sara next time I saw you. Figured maybe I could talk you folks into getting yourselves a paper shredder.” He sighed. “I just wanted to show you how easy it would be for a person to piece together all kinds of personal information if they wanted. You just never know what somebody out there might do.”

“Not these days,” Officer Bill said.

“Bought my wife one of those things,” Officer Stump conceded. “Paper shredder, I mean. You can get ‘em pretty cheap.”

At that point, watching Officers Bill and Stump swallow Roger’s ridiculous explanation hook, line, and sinker, I realized that these two ham hocks were taking every word he said as gospel.

Ask him to explain why he’s got personal files on all his neighbors,
I wanted to tell them.
Ask where he got our Social Security numbers. Ask him to explain why he’s got a copy of my doctoral thesis from the NYU library. While you’re at it, ask him to tell you about some guy named Darius Calvin. Because he’s got all kinds of information about some guy named Darius Calvin. I’m anxious to hear more about that one myself.

But it was three against one. I was outnumbered and outgunned. The victorious warrior wins first.

I said, “You guys aren’t going to do anything about this, are you?”

Officer Stump turned to me. “Sir, I’ll be honest. At this point, I’m not clear on what exactly you’d like us to do.”

“As far as I can see,” Officer Bill added, “the trespassing complaint here isn’t yours.”

They both looked at Roger.

Roger shook his head. “No, guys. There’s no complaint here.”

“You sure about that, Rodge?”

“I think all we have here is a misunderstanding.” Roger shook his head again for emphasis. “As far as I’m concerned, Paul did me a favor.”

“Oh?”

“No telling where Wessie might have ended up.” Roger looked at the officers. Then he looked at me. He was still looking at me when he said, “I’m just glad somebody was paying attention.”

AN HOUR AFTER THE POLICE HAD GONE, Sara returned home from campus to find me in our driveway, in full view of Roger’s house, demolishing a wireless security camera with a hammer from the garage. She watched awhile, then said, “Bad day?”

“Hi, honey.” I gave her a kiss. “There’s a stew on in the house.” Then I went back to work on the camera.

Everyone in the circle knew they had these damned things pointed at their houses? And they’d actually signed up for it? My first instinct was disbelief, but logic suggested strongly that Roger wouldn’t have claimed such an easily verifiable fact if it weren’t true. I just couldn’t believe that during all the nights I’d spent walking the neighborhood with Pete, or Michael, or even Barry Firth, not once had anybody expressed any qualms or
concerns regarding this neighborhood surveillance feed. Was I the only one who found such a thing intolerable?

As I thought about it, I decided it wasn’t surprising that I hadn’t received any complaints from Barry, who clearly hungered for Roger’s approval. It seemed that Pete Seward had withdrawn a bit since that first day we’d spent on the golf course, when I’d overheard his conversation with Roger on the clubhouse deck. But Pete had his own reasons for that. The truth was, ever since that night I still wished I could unspend with Melody, I’d withdrawn more than a little myself.

I decided I’d go over to Michael’s after he got home from the restaurant. If I was overreacting to any or all of this, I could count on Michael to tell me so.

Meanwhile, I hadn’t finished reacting yet. While I took a certain amount of satisfaction in mangling the camera, this was ultimately kid stuff, and the feeling didn’t last for very long after I was through.

I considered walking over and leaving the camera shrapnel on Roger’s doorstep. Then I got a better idea, went inside, and looked up the street address for Sentinel One, Incorporated. I kissed Sara again on my way out, told her I’d be back for dinner, and drove to Sentinel One’s office building on Dewberry Street.

“I’m sorry, sir,” the receptionist told me. She had a wide mouth and lank brown hair, and I believe there was something about my demeanor that scared her a little. “Mr. Gardner is gone for the day.”

“Is that what he told you?” I nodded at her phone, which she’d just hung up. “Call back and tell him it’s Paul Callaway. One of Roger’s neighbors.”

“I told him your name, sir.”

I smiled. “I thought you said he’d left for the day?”

The receptionist blanched. Her eyes darted to one side, then the other. There was nobody else in the reception area. It was only her and me.

“All right,” I said. Even with my temper up, I felt a little sorry for her. She was only doing her job. I raised the plastic SaveMore bag, which contained the remains of our backyard camera. “Tell Mr. Gardner that we’ll be discontinuing the special service at 34 Sycamore Court.”

The receptionist recoiled slightly when I dropped the sack on the desk in front of her with a clatter. She blinked at me. She looked at the sack. She took up a pen and began scribbling on a memo pad. I turned and walked out the door I’d come in.

The days had grown shorter. It was already dusk outside, fading by the minute. On my way through the customer parking lot behind the Sentinel One office building, I felt a familiar tingle at the back of my neck and glanced over my shoulder.

In a lighted window, behind open blinds, I saw a figure watching me. I could discern the shape of a bald head from where I stood. Almost as soon as I turned, the light in the window went dark. The glass turned flat, reflecting the indigo sky.

Gone for the day, my ass.

Sara sighed when I finished describing the events of the afternoon. “Paul,” she said.

“Me? What me?” I pointed over my shoulder, generally indicating the neighborhood beyond our door, specifically meaning Roger’s house on the other side of the circle.
“Him.”

She shook her head, poured us each a glass of wine. “I just don’t know.”

On the table between us sat our Sentinel One service contract, which I’d found upstairs. Sara picked up the contract, folded the pages back, and reread the video security clause. We’d found the provision together, along with my initials, right where Roger had claimed they would be.

Gently, she said, “Weren’t you here with the installers that day?”

Of course I’d been here. I’d gotten the hell out of the way, tried to ignore the racket, and when the guys from Sentinel One
were finished, I’d signed where the guy told me, thanked him for all the work, and closed the door behind him. Which was all, as far as I was concerned, completely beside the point.

“Cameras or no cameras.” I flicked the contract with the back of my finger. “Nothing in here changes the fact that Roger’s got a filing box full of
our
personal information hidden away over there.” I drank half my wine in a gulp. “The son of a bitch probably knows more about us than
I
do off the top of my head.”

She frowned. “What was his explanation?”

“Who, Roger?”

“What did he say when you talked to him?”

“I wasn’t interested in Roger’s explanation,” I told her. “There
is
no explanation.”

Sara tilted her wineglass back and forth on its base. She chewed her lip the way she did when she was thinking hard about what to say next.

I waited as long as I could, then finally said, “What?”

“Nothing,” she said. Then she shrugged. “I was just thinking of Larry Anders for some reason.”

I couldn’t help rolling my eyes. Larry Anders had been our next- door neighbor back in Newton. “This isn’t even remotely the—”

“Remember the time he came over and recommended that lawn service?” She seemed vaguely nostalgic, as though watching the memory replay in her wineglass. “He gave you their business card. And a coupon, as I recall.”

“Sara…”

“You told him to get bent,” she reminded me. “In so many words. And then you let the yard go for the rest of the summer.”

“Larry Anders was a jackass,” I reminded her. “You never liked him either.”

“True,” she said. “But I didn’t make him my personal sworn nemesis.” As soon as I opened my mouth to argue, she waved the comment away.
Withdrawn, Your Honor.
“What did the police say?”

“I told you, they just stood there agreeing with everything Roger—”

“Not about the cameras,” she said. “I mean this box of stuff you found.”

“I didn’t tell them about any of that.”

She looked at me. “Should I even bother to ask why not?”

“What was I supposed to say? Officers, I was poking around in Roger’s attic and I found
this?”
I knocked back the rest of my wine. “Believe me, they were already pretty sure that
I
was the problem.”

I caught Sara glancing toward the service contract on the table, a seemingly accidental gesture, which she covered quickly. She said nothing.

Little by little, I began to recognize how unconvincing my reasoning must have sounded to Sara—in part because I hadn’t told her the full scope of my feud with Roger. And now I was forced to stop and consider my position.

I couldn’t tell Sara everything. Not without telling her everything.

And in telling Sara only part of the truth, I knew that I was telling her a lie. Just as surely as I’d been lying to her for weeks now: by pretending that what had happened between me and Melody Seward, that one irredeemably rotten- headed night, hadn’t really happened at all.

The same way I was lying to myself: by telling myself that one thing had nothing to do with the other. By telling myself that I was, in some way, protecting our marriage by pretending as if I hadn’t betrayed it.

“I haven’t told you everything,” I said.

She smiled a little. “You mean there’s more?”

I felt as though I were flying low with a full payload. I nodded at her wineglass. “You’d better have some of that.”

She gave me a stern look.

So I told her about the paperwork I’d found. Employment history records, duplicate copies of photo ID cards, even a copy
of birth certificate, all filed neatly away in Roger’s box labeled
34 Sycamore Court.
All about a man named Darius Calvin. Our wolf.

I watched Sara’s face as this piece of heavy ordnance drifted toward her, suspended on my carefully constructed parachute of narrative. By the time I’d stopped talking, she wasn’t looking at me anymore.

“Four months,” I said, reaching across the table. “Four months, and the cops don’t even pretend to have any leads.”

Her hand felt stiff in mine.

“How is it,” I said, “that Roger Mallory has a whole damned
dossier
on this guy, whom the cops can’t seem to find, in a box with our name on it?”

Sara looked down at her wine. While I’d finished mine, she still hadn’t taken the first sip of hers.

I waited.

After a long minute of silence, she pulled her hand away casually and said, “Paul, I don’t know what you saw over there.”

“I’m telling you what I saw.”

“What you’re telling me doesn’t make any sense.”

“That’s exactly my point.”

More silence. I couldn’t read the expression on her face. I said, “Say something.”

She swirled her wine carefully in her glass. At last, she met my eye.

I held her gaze. “What?”

“You said it yourself.” She sighed. “It happened months ago.”

“And?”

“And we were both out of our wits. And it all happened so fast.”

I saw where this was going. It felt like something wilting in my chest.

Sara said, “Can you be sure you’d even recognize him? If you saw him now?”

Without pausing to check myself, I said, “Would you?”

Her expression hardened. She straightened her spine, placed her wineglass on the table. Folded her hands in front of her.