Rebecca was pulling weeds when she saw him standing at the fence again, just watching her back door. He did this most mornings now. She had read a scary neighbor story online once, some warning about people like him, and she had laughed it off. She wasn’t laughing anymore.
“Can I help you with something, Gary?” she said.
He didn’t answer. He just looked at the door like he was waiting for someone to open it.
“Gary.”
“Your husband home?” he said finally.
“He’s at work. Why?”
Gary shrugged and walked back toward his own yard. Rebecca stood there for a second, holding a fistful of weeds, then went inside and locked the door, even though it was ten in the morning.
She remembered the thing with the ladder from last week. She had come home and found her back gate open and a stepladder from her shed sitting under her bedroom window. Gary said he’d borrowed it to fix his gutter and put it back in the wrong spot. She told her husband, Dale, and Dale said it was probably nothing.
“He probably did just borrow it,” Dale said that night. “You’re going to make yourself crazy over a ladder.”
“He put it under our window, Dale.”
“Under the shed wall. It’s the same wall as the window.”
She didn’t argue. She was tired, and Dale had work in the morning, and it seemed easier to let it go. That was three days ago.
Now it was Thursday and Gary was at the fence again, except this time he had something in his hand. A photograph. He held it up so she could see it without coming any closer.
It was a picture of her, taken from behind, in her own kitchen.
“Where did you get that?” she said.
“You should close your blinds,” Gary said. “Anybody could get a picture like that.”
“Did you take this?”
He put the photo back in his pocket like the conversation was over and said, “Tell Dale I said hi.”
Rebecca went inside and called Dale, but it went to voicemail. She called the police instead. The officer who came out was polite and wrote things down and told her that standing on your own property and holding a photograph wasn’t a crime, not unless she could prove he’d been inside her house.
“He was in my yard with a ladder,” she said.
“Did you see him take the picture?”
“No.”
“I understand this is upsetting,” the officer said, “but there’s nothing I can charge him with right now. If he comes onto your property again, call us.”
After the officer left, Rebecca stood in her kitchen and looked at the window over the sink, the one that faced Gary’s yard. She had never noticed before how easy it would be to see straight through it from his porch.
She went out to check the blinds and Gary was standing right at the fence line, closer than the property line probably allowed. He had a mug of coffee like it was any other morning.
“Nice officer,” he said. “Friendly guy.”
“Stay away from my house.”
“I’ve lived here longer than you have.”
“That’s not what I said.”
Gary took a sip of his coffee and looked past her, at the house, like he was doing some kind of math in his head. “Dale still working those late shifts?”
Rebecca didn’t answer. She backed toward her door, keeping her eyes on him the whole way, and went inside and locked it again. She checked the kitchen window lock, then the back door lock, then went upstairs and checked the bedroom window, the one over the shed.
It was unlocked. She was sure she had locked it that morning.
She stood there for a long time looking at the latch, trying to remember if she’d actually checked it or only thought she had, and downstairs she heard something that might have been the back door, or might have been the wind pushing against it, and she didn’t move toward the stairs yet.
