Chapter 1: Three Feet Appeared Overnight Beside Kevin’s Fence The orange survey stake had not been there Sunday night. Kevin Lewis knew because he had spent twenty minutes along that fence line before dinner, cutting back honeysuckle that had begun reaching through the old wire. The new stake stood in bare soil now, bright enough…
Chapter 1: The Morning His Garden Went Dry Raymond Harris knew something was wrong before he reached the first row of tomatoes. The sprinkler nearest the shed was turning normally, throwing a clean silver arc across the beans. Twenty yards farther north, the next head coughed twice and dribbled water into the dirt. Beyond that,…
Chapter 1: The Footing Went In Before Breakfast The concrete truck was already backing between the houses when Raymond Miller stepped onto his patio with a mug of coffee in his hand. For a second, he thought the driver had taken the wrong driveway. Then he saw the orange mixer chute swinging toward the narrow…
Chapter 1: The Keycard Turned Red at the Ramp The reader flashed red before Samuel Hall had even taken his hand away. He stared at it, then at the steel gate, as if one of them had made a mistake that might correct itself out of embarrassment. Behind his truck, the little aluminum fishing boat…
Chapter 1: The Yellow Lines Beside the Barn Frank Carter stopped with one hand on the barn door. Six bright yellow rectangles cut across the gravel beside his red barn. For several seconds he simply looked at them. The night before, that patch had been gray stone, tire marks, and weeds pushing up along the…
Chapter 1: Six Parking Spaces Beside His House The first thing Timothy Hill noticed was the silver sedan parked where his storage bins had been. The second was the asphalt beneath it. He slowed halfway into his driveway, one hand still on the steering wheel, and stared across the passenger seat toward the side of…
Chapter 1: The Tow Truck Was Already in His Driveway Michael Walker knew something was wrong before he reached his house. The yellow boom of a tow truck rose above the hedges at the end of his street, angled against the pale morning sky. At first he assumed somebody had broken down. Then he turned…
Chapter 1: The Shed That Wasn’t There Six Weeks Ago Linda King saw the roof before she saw the rest of it. She had one hand wrapped around the handle of her suitcase and the other pushing open the wooden side gate when a dark green metal roof appeared above the hydrangeas at the back…
Chapter 1: The Trucks That Did Not Belong on Richard’s Lane At 7:12 on Friday morning, the first dump truck stopped so hard that its empty bed gave a metallic shudder. Richard Lewis stood twenty feet inside his property with a white coffee mug warming both hands. The truck idled in front of the new…
Chapter 1: Six Boats Were Tied Where Scott Had Said No Every cleat on Scott Harris’s dock had a rope around it. He saw that before he saw the boats. Six lines pulled tight against the galvanized cleats he had bolted into the cedar planks himself, each rope angling toward a hull rocking gently beyond…