PART 1 — DON’T WASH IT
Verna Dunlop and I had been at it about the driveway for six months.
There is a strip of concrete beside my garage on Kestrel Court, eleven feet wide, and it is mine. It is on the plat, it is on my deed, and the fence line on the survey runs four feet past it.
Verna has lived in that house since 1999 and she had been parking on it since before I bought mine, because the man who owned it before me was eighty-one and did not drive.
She called it “basically shared” and she said it in a tone that made it sound like I had suggested something vulgar.
I asked her nine times over six months. I put it in writing twice. I paid a hundred and eighty dollars to have the line marked because she said my survey was wrong.
Last Tuesday I had her SUV towed.
She came out onto her porch in a bathrobe and screamed across two lawns that I would regret it, and three houses on that street heard her.
At thirteen minutes past two on the Thursday morning I woke up to a metal noise.
I got to the bedroom window in time to see Verna Dunlop going across my lawn in the dark in a coat and boots.
There was a bucket lying on its side beside my car.
My SUV is white. It was not white any more. Red, across the hood, down the driver’s side, across the back, and pooled on the concrete.
By the time I got a coat on and got out there she was inside her own house with the lights off.
I had no camera on that driveway. Nobody else was awake. There was nothing in the world that proved it was her except a bucket and a woman who had shouted a threat on a Tuesday.
I rang it in anyway at about half past two and gave her name, and the dispatcher took it and said an officer would be out in the morning, and I did not sleep.
At seven-twenty somebody hammered on my door.
I opened it expecting Verna.
There were three police cars on Kestrel Court and two of them were outside her house. Her garage door was up and two officers were in it.
Verna was standing barefoot on her own lawn in her pyjamas shouting that she had not done anything.
A third officer came up my driveway. Marisol Behn, on her tape.
“Ma’am, is the damaged vehicle yours?”
“Yes.”
She looked at it for a while. At the red down the whole side of it.
Then she said, “Don’t wash it.”
“Why not?”
And before she answered, one of the officers came out of Verna Dunlop’s garage holding a paint can, half empty, by the wire handle with a gloved hand.
I actually laughed. It came out before I could stop it.
I said, “Well. There’s my proof.”
Neither of them smiled.
The older one had come up the drive by then. Sergeant Osgood Lind, mid-fifties, and he was not looking at the paint can.
He said, “This isn’t about your car.”
Then he asked me when I had bought it.
“Three years ago. Why?”
He walked the length of it slowly and then crouched down at the back, by the rear bumper, on the driver’s side.
The paint had run down there and sat, and where it had sat, something had come away. There was a patch about the size of a hand where a white coating had gone soft and lifted, and underneath it the metal was a different colour.
And there were letters scratched into it.
Not printed. Scratched, with something sharp, by somebody who was not being careful.
Sergeant Lind wiped at them with his thumb and then with the edge of a glove.
He looked at them for about four seconds.
Then his radio went, and he said something into it that I did not catch, and he listened, and he read those letters out loud into it.
And then he stood up.
“Behn. Get her away from the vehicle.”
I said, “What’s going on?”
