CHAPTER 2: THE SIDING GAP
“Where did you buy that unit, Frank?”
The question didn’t hang in the air; it fell like lead into the porch dust. Her tone had lost the nasal, sing-song cadence of the civic committee. It had flattened out completely, the vowels clipped short and dry, like someone reading serial numbers off an invoice.
Frank didn’t shift his stance. His thumb remained anchored against the warm resin, feeling the faint, gummy give of the fresh sealant beneath the barcode. “Hardware store over on Ninth. Same place I bought the deck stain. Same place I bought the lag bolts holding up the gutter you complained about in June.”
“They don’t sell this model on Ninth,” Karen said. She didn’t look up at his face; her gaze stayed pinned to the black casing, tracking the line of Frank’s knuckles. “The Ninth Street depot carries the retail shell with the battery tray. They haven’t stocked the two-wire bus chassis since the municipal code shifted back in eighteen.”
“Then I found old stock,” Frank said. “Now let go of the collar.”
“It’s not old stock.”
She reached into her canvas bag, her shoulder dipping as she worked something loose from the bottom. Frank’s weight shifted toward his back heel, preparing to wedge his boot against the baseboard if she brought out something worse than a pry bar. But when her hand came back into the late sun, she was holding an ordinary yellow-handled utility knife, its blade retracted, the cast-iron casing nicked and darkened by machine grease. She didn’t extend the steel. She used the blunt aluminum butt to tap the cedar siding two inches to the left of the hole she had torn open.
The wood gave off a dull, hollow thud—not the clean knock of solid studs, but the brittle rattle of dry rot chewing through lath.
“You smell that, Frank?” she asked.
“I smell cedar.”
“You smell ozone.” She tapped the wood again, harder this time, dislodging a small flake of baked latex paint that drifted down onto the toe of her canvas sneaker. “You think you’re pulling twelve volts off that little doorbell chime behind your coat rack. That chime’s been dead since your wife had the parlor repainted.”
Frank felt a cold knot tighten under his breastbone, heavy and sour, but his grip on the twin-lead copper wire didn’t yield an inch. The copper was warm—too warm for a low-draw intermittent signal that only closed a circuit when someone pressed a plastic button. “Keep Sarah out of your mouth, Karen.”
“I’m not talking about Sarah. I’m talking about your feed.” She took a single step closer, her sunglasses tilting up toward the soffit. The movement let the late-afternoon sun catch the rim of her jaw, highlighting the faint sheen of sweat breaking through her foundation. “You’ve got six pairs of low-voltage communication running along the south boundary. Five of them belong to the telephone box that hasn’t been serviced since the flood. The sixth is drawing thirty-six watts continuous. Day and night. Rain or drought.”
“It’s a security camera,” Frank said, his jaw tightening until the enamel of his molars ground together. “It runs on juice. Juice costs money. I pay the power bill.”
“Not to the street, you don’t.” She lowered the utility knife, turning the blunt edge over between her manicured fingers with the steady, practiced rhythm of a card dealer. “That transformer under your stairs isn’t connected to your breaker panel, Frank. It’s bridged through the footer. It’s grounded to the common water main behind my crawl space.”
Frank stared at her, the skin around his eyes pulling tight. The cedar porch beneath his feet felt suddenly fragile, like an old floor over an open pit. For forty years, he had treated every linear foot of the property as an unbroken ledger: where his fence met her gravel, where his mower blade lifted to clear her flagstones, where the copper water line tapped the municipal feeder buried six feet in the hard dirt. A man didn’t lose his ground to words.
“You’re trespassing,” Frank said, each syllable measured, hard, and plain. “You stepped three feet over the boundary line, you put an iron tool to my doorframe, and you ripped three inches of copper out of the siding. That’s criminal mischief. The sheriff doesn’t care about thirty-six watts.”
Karen let out a dry, breathy chuckle that had no humor in it. “Call him.”
She held up the hand that wasn’t holding the utility knife, showing him empty, stained palms. “Call Sheriff Miller. Tell him I’m out here touching your porch. He’ll take twenty minutes to drive down the ridge, he’ll lean on his cruiser, and he’ll ask why you have a jumper tapped into the county easement.”
Frank looked down at the backplate in his palm. The three digits etched into the plastic—4-0-9—were rough at the margins, melted in with the fine tip of a soldering gun. Right beside the score, where the rubber insulation met the bracket, was a thread of bare silver wire, thin as fishing line, that had never come out of a retail package. It ran parallel to the copper pair, vanishing into a second, hairline drill-hole tucked behind the siding’s lower lip.
She saw him notice it. Her hand stopped fidgeting with the knife.
“You didn’t install this, did you?” Karen murmured. The sharp, abrasive armor of her voice cracked open, revealing something hollow and worn thin beneath it. “You had some kid from the strip mall do it after the break-ins on North Ridge.”
“I do my own work,” Frank lied. His voice didn’t waver, but his fingers slipped an eighth of an inch against the tacky silicone.
“Then you know where that silver trace leads,” she said, pointing the knife’s brass butt down toward the porch skirting, where the weathered lattice met the hard-packed red clay and the overgrown roots of the boxwoods. “Because it doesn’t go to your chime, Frank. And it’s not pointing toward the road.”
