“They don’t sell this model on Ninth,” Karen said. She didn’t look up at his face; her gaze stayed pinned to the black casing, tracking the line of Frank’s knuckles. “The Ninth Street depot carries the retail shell with the battery tray. They haven’t stocked the two-wire bus chassis since the municipal code shifted back in eighteen.”
“Then I found old stock,” Frank said. “Now let go of the collar.”
“It’s not old stock.”
She reached into her canvas bag, her shoulder dipping as she worked something loose from the bottom. Frank’s weight shifted toward his back heel, preparing to wedge his boot against the baseboard if she brought out something worse than a pry bar. But when her hand came back into the late sun, she was holding an ordinary yellow-handled utility knife, its blade retracted, the cast-iron casing nicked and darkened by machine grease. She didn’t extend the steel. She used the blunt aluminum butt to tap the cedar siding two inches to the left of the hole she had torn open.
The wood gave off a dull, hollow thud—not the clean knock of solid studs, but the brittle rattle of dry rot chewing through lath.
“You smell that, Frank?” she asked.
“I smell cedar.”
“You smell ozone.” She tapped the wood again, harder this time, dislodging a small flake of baked latex paint that drifted down onto the toe of her canvas sneaker. “You think you’re pulling twelve volts off that little doorbell chime behind your coat rack. That chime’s been dead since your wife had the parlor repainted.”
Frank felt a cold knot tighten under his breastbone, heavy and sour, but his grip on the twin-lead copper wire didn’t yield an inch. The copper was warm—too warm for a low-draw intermittent signal that only closed a circuit when someone pressed a plastic button. “Keep Sarah out of your mouth, Karen.”
“I’m not talking about Sarah. I’m talking about your feed.” She took a single step closer, her sunglasses tilting up toward the soffit. The movement let the late-afternoon sun catch the rim of her jaw, highlighting the faint sheen of sweat breaking through her foundation. “You’ve got six pairs of low-voltage communication running along the south boundary. Five of them belong to the telephone box that hasn’t been serviced since the flood. The sixth is drawing thirty-six watts continuous. Day and night. Rain or drought.”
“It’s a security camera,” Frank said, his jaw tightening until the enamel of his molars ground together. “It runs on juice. Juice costs money. I pay the power bill.”
“Not to the street, you don’t.” She lowered the utility knife, turning the blunt edge over between her manicured fingers with the steady, practiced rhythm of a card dealer. “That transformer under your stairs isn’t connected to your breaker panel, Frank. It’s bridged through the footer. It’s grounded to the common water main behind my crawl space.”
Frank stared at her, the skin around his eyes pulling tight. The cedar porch beneath his feet felt suddenly fragile, like an old floor over an open pit. For forty years, he had treated every linear foot of the property as an unbroken ledger: where his fence met her gravel, where his mower blade lifted to clear her flagstones, where the copper water line tapped the municipal feeder buried six feet in the hard dirt. A man didn’t lose his ground to words.
“You’re trespassing,” Frank said, each syllable measured, hard, and plain. “You stepped three feet over the boundary line, you put an iron tool to my doorframe, and you ripped three inches of copper out of the siding. That’s criminal mischief. The sheriff doesn’t care about thirty-six watts.”