He needed it to detonate. He needed the two loudest, most detail-oriented women on Wisteria Court to be at each other's throats in front of the whole association twelve days before an audit vote, so that when either of us opened our mouths about anything, we'd be the two crazy neighbors with the pink cars.
The only reason it didn't work is that he did it twice.
If he'd left Lorna alone I would have gone to my grave certain it was her. I'd have sold that house eventually. I'd have told this story at parties for twenty years with her as the villain in it.
He got greedy about the second one, and the second one is the only reason anyone ever looked at the shed.
Lorna and I are not best friends. I want to be honest about that, because the tidy version of this story ends with us having wine on the porch every Friday, and that's not what happened.
What happened is that we are two women in our late forties and early fifties who spent sixteen months believing the worst about each other and then found out we'd both been played by a retired insurance adjuster in a golf shirt.
That's not a friendship. It's something stranger and, honestly, more solid.
We had coffee at her kitchen table on the day of the search warrant and she told me about the fourteen months after Ward died, and about how the citation letter arrived on what would have been their anniversary, which I did not know and which she had never told me, and which explains the entire thing.
I apologized for the complaint. I meant it.
She apologized for "he's a dog, it's dirt," which she remembered word for word, same as me.
We rebuilt the fence together in November. Both of us paid half, and Bruiser has not been in my beds since, and I have started putting a dog biscuit on the post for him in the mornings, which Lorna says is undermining her training and which I intend to continue doing.
The insurance covered both cars in the end, and once the criminal case resolved, the restitution order covered both deductibles.
My car is dark gray again. Hers is white again.
And every so often somebody new moves into Cedar Marsh Estates and hears a version of this at the pool, and they always say the same thing.
They say: what a coincidence, that her car got hit the very next time.
And I always tell them the same thing back.
I thought it was karma too. I stood on my porch in my slippers at half past seven in the morning and I looked at that woman's pink car and something small and ugly in me said good.
