The last name was familiar. She had been appointed to the neighborhood board in 2022, and I’d met her twice at meetings, although she’d never spoken to me directly. I called the board office and asked why one person had filed thirty-one complaints against my property when I’d never received a single notice. The woman on the phone said the complaints weren’t all about the fence. Some were about the chain-link, some about weeds, some about the mailbox, and several were simply marked “unauthorized exterior alteration.” I asked what alteration she meant. She said there was a photograph attached to the original complaint showing a section of my property that wasn’t visible from the street. I asked how the woman had photographed it. She said she didn’t know, but the photograph was taken from inside my backyard, looking toward the house.
I went home and checked the old security footage, even though the cameras only went back ninety days. Nothing. Then I called the management company again and asked for the earliest complaint. The first one was dated February 2022, and attached to it was a photograph of the chain-link fence from the inside. The angle bothered me because there was no way to take it from the road. I asked whether the reporting member had ever requested access to my property, and the woman said no. Then she said there was another document attached that I hadn’t asked for. It was a handwritten statement from a contractor who’d apparently inspected the fence before the complaints began. His note said the fence wasn’t new at all. It had been there since 1998, exactly as I remembered. But underneath that was a sentence that changed everything: “The homeowner was not present when I inspected it, but someone inside the house told me where to look.”
I asked who had been inside my house in 2022, and there was only one person I could think of. My daughter had been staying with me for three months after her divorce, but she had moved out before the complaints started. I called her anyway, and when I mentioned the board member’s name, she went silent. She finally said that woman had approached her once in the grocery store and asked whether I still lived alone. My daughter had thought it was strange and never told me. Then I went back through the complaint file and found one more photograph, dated the week before the first violation. It showed the inside of my garage, including a box I hadn’t opened since my husband died. The board member couldn’t possibly have taken it from the street. And when I looked at the metadata, I realized the photograph had been taken with a phone that had been connected to my home’s Wi-Fi.
