I sent it at 9:14 on a Monday morning.
Three days later I woke up to my car.
It was the fourth of September, a Thursday. I came out at about ten past seven to put the recycling by the curb and I stopped on the top step.
My car — a 2017 sedan, dark gray, paid off in January, which I mention because it mattered a great deal to me — was pink.
Not a stripe. Not a word. Not a key mark.
The entire thing. Hood, roof, doors, trunk, bumpers. The windows. The mirrors. The headlights and taillights, painted right over the glass. The tires had pink on them where somebody had gotten sloppy at the bottom of the panels.
It was a flat, chalky, bubblegum pink, and it had roller marks in it. Long straight ones down the doors and short overlapping ones on the hood, the way you'd paint a wall.
Somebody had stood in my driveway for hours with a roller and a tray.
I want to describe what that actually does to a person, because "they painted my car" sounds almost funny and it was not funny at seven in the morning.
I sat down on my own front step and shook.
It wasn't the money. It was the hours. Somebody had been eleven feet from my bedroom window, in the dark, for a long time, working. Somebody had taken breaks. Somebody had refilled a tray.
I called the sheriff's department at 7:25.
Deputy Arnett came out at nine. He took photographs, he took a statement, and he gave me a case number.
I told him about Lorna. I told him about the tulips and the letter and the trash cans and the hose. I said her name three times.
He wrote it all down, and then he explained the thing I already knew.
No camera. No witness. No prints worth pulling off a painted surface. He could go over and talk to her, and he did, and she told him she'd been home asleep, which is exactly what an innocent person and a guilty person both say.
He said, and this is a direct quote, "Ma'am, I believe you that you know who did it. I can't do anything with what you know."
Pavel Ruska at Ruska Auto Body out on the Ridley Fork road quoted me $4,200 to strip and repaint, and told me two things that I did not understand the importance of at the time.
The first was that it wasn't automotive paint. It was exterior house paint. Latex. He said you could see it in how it had already started to lift at the edges of the panels.
The second was that whoever did it had used a nine-inch roller with a thick nap, which he knew because of the stipple pattern, and that they'd used a lot of it. He estimated three gallons, minimum.
Three gallons of exterior latex.
My insurance covered it under comprehensive with a $1,000 deductible, which I paid, which I could not really afford.
And two days later I saw Lorna over the fence.
She said, "Marnie, I heard about your car. That's — my God. Are you all right?"
And she sounded sincere, and that made me want to scream, because I was certain she'd done it and now she was standing in her yard being kind about it.
I said, "I'm fine, Lorna," in a voice I'm not proud of, and I went inside.
My son Ellis came out that weekend from Ridley Fork and put up a camera over the garage. A little white thing on a bracket, obvious, pointed down the driveway. He said, "There. Now if she does it again you've got her."
