Chapter 6

The surveyor came on a Tuesday, two weeks after the vote, on a morning when the school buses had already run and the street was quiet. He was a young man with a reflective vest and a tripod and a bright orange bag, and he walked the creek strip behind the houses on the far side of Meadow Row with the unhurried pace of someone doing exactly what he was paid for.

Cyrus met him at the gate at the back of his lot, the one that opened onto the creek bank. They shook hands, checked the paperwork, and walked the line together, the surveyor calling out measurements in a low voice, Cyrus listening, hands in his pockets.

Marisol watched from her back porch, coffee in hand, because her back fence ran straight down to the creek, and she'd always assumed the creek strip was just — open. Common. Nobody's. The neighborhood kids played there in the summer. The high schoolers had a rope swing on the oak that leaned over the water. She'd never once thought to ask who owned the wet ground the kids ran through.

The surveyor's orange stakes went in that afternoon. Six of them, along the boundary he'd verified, each one planted with a steady tap of a small hammer.

By evening, the word had spread. Not because Cyrus told anyone — he didn't. But because the stakes were visible from the back fences, and because one of them went up in the corner of Ed Kowalczyk's backyard, where Ed's shed sat six feet over the line, and Ed noticed, and Ed asked, and the answer — that the strip belonged to the Alvarado estate, and that Cyrus Alvarado was the sole beneficiary — had traveled from fence to fence by dark.

The phone started ringing at Junelle's house at seven-thirty. By eight-fifteen, she'd gotten eleven calls. By eight-thirty, she was standing at her back fence in her robe, looking at the orange stake that had gone up four feet into her own yard, behind her pool, where the deck had been poured eleven years ago on what she'd always called "the county's strip."

"Mr. Alvarado," she said, when Cyrus answered the phone at nine that night. "We need to talk about the boundary line."