The calendar was open to January, and one date had been circled four times in red ink, each circle darker than the last. It was the same date as the calls in our records. I asked him what it meant, and he looked at me for a long moment before saying the previous owners had always marked that day too. He told me he had lived there for nineteen years and had never understood why the former owner would come outside every January and stand at the end of the driveway until someone arrived.
I asked him what usually happened after that, and he said he didn’t know because the man never let anyone inside. But this year, after the January call, he had found something tucked beneath the welcome mat. It was an old photograph of the house taken from across the road, and on the back were four dates written in the same handwriting as the dates in our emergency logs. I recognized the address immediately, but what bothered me was the person standing beside the mailbox in every photograph. The face was never clear, but the clothes were different each time.
I went back to the department and pulled the original reports instead of the summaries I’d used for the slideshow. The first call in 1997 had been logged as a medical emergency, but there was no patient name. The 2008 call had the same description, except someone had added one handwritten line: “Do not enter the basement.” The 2019 report had that line crossed out and replaced with, “Basement already empty.” I knew the basement had never been mentioned during my own call, so I called the dispatcher who had taken it and asked why the note had been changed.
She was quiet before telling me that the firefighter who wrote it had died three months later. Then she said there was one more thing she’d never put in the official report. On every one of those four calls, the person who called 911 had given the same name, even though the first caller was supposedly a woman, the second was a man, and the third was me. I asked her what name was on the January call this year, and she said, “Yours.”
