Chapter 3: Four Screws
I called the non-emergency line back with my thumb shaking and asked them to patch me through to whoever was on scene.
Two minutes later, my screen filled with the face of Officer Lena Ramirez. Dark hair in a tight bun. The bright Phoenix sun behind her, and behind that, my own backyard, which I had never seen from that angle on a stranger’s phone.
“Mrs. Whitfield? Your neighbor is telling me you gave her family permission to use the pool this weekend. She says you left them a key to the gate.”
“There is no key,” I said. “There’s a latch. And they didn’t come through the gate. They took down the fence.”
“She says the fence came down on its own.”
Greg made a sound next to me like a kettle.
“Officer,” I said, “can I send you two things?”
I sent her the screenshot of my June text to Tracy. Please don’t ask again. With her thumbs-up underneath.
Then I sent her a clip from the side-yard camera. I’d found it while we waited. Thursday night, 9:40 p.m., the night after we left. Kevin Pruitt, in that same gray tank top, holding a cordless drill and a flashlight in his teeth. Unscrewing the first cedar panel. Then the second. Then the third. Stacking them against his shed.
“Four screws,” Greg muttered. “My foot.”
Officer Ramirez watched the clip twice. She didn’t say anything. She just turned around, still holding the phone, so I could see the yard.
The kids were out of the pool now, wrapped in towels, sitting on my patio steps in a dripping row. A second officer was handing out bottles of water. The pink flamingo floated alone in the middle of the pool. The grill was still smoking.
Tracy stood by the fence gap with her arms crossed, her sunglasses down now. Kevin stood beside her, his cap off, suddenly looking a lot less relaxed.
“Mr. Pruitt,” Officer Ramirez said, walking toward him. “Is this you on this video?”
“I mean—it’s a fence panel. I was going to put it back.”
“Did the homeowners give you permission to remove it?”
“They weren’t using the pool—”
“That’s not what I asked.”
Tracy stepped in. “She said we could. She said it in June! She said the kids could come over whenever!”
Officer Ramirez held up the phone with my text on it. “Ma’am, she texted you no. You replied with a thumbs-up.”
Tracy opened her mouth. Closed it. Looked at Kevin.
What happened next took about fifteen minutes and I watched all of it. Officer Ramirez had the parents come collect the six kids who weren’t Pruitts. She took photos of the fence, the stacked panels, the cooler, the drill still sitting on Kevin’s patio table. Then she wrote Kevin Pruitt two citations: one for criminal trespass, one for criminal damage.
“You’ll get a court date,” she told him. “And I’d strongly suggest you put that fence back up tonight. All four screws.”
Kevin didn’t look at the camera again.
Tracy did. Right as the officers were leaving, she walked straight up to the patio camera under the light, so close that her face filled my whole screen, and said, very clearly:
“You’ll regret this. Everyone on this street is going to know what kind of person you are.”
Then she yanked the flamingo out of my pool by its neck and dragged it home.
We drove back Sunday morning. I didn’t sleep. Greg drove the whole way with both hands on the wheel.
When we came through the side gate, the first thing I noticed was the smell. Stale beer, cooked meat and something sour underneath it.
The second thing was the water.
It wasn’t blue anymore. It was a cloudy, greenish gray, like dishwater. Hot dog buns had swelled into white blobs along the steps. A slick of grease shimmered on the surface in the sun. Beer cans had sunk to the bottom of the deep end.
And from the equipment pad behind the garage came a horrible grinding shriek, metal on metal, like the pump was eating itself.
Greg ran to shut it off.
When he came back, he was holding the filter cartridge in both hands. It was black. Not dirty. Black, packed solid with grease and chunks of bun and something that looked like melted plastic.
“Dana,” he said quietly. “The motor’s burned out. The whole system’s gone.”
My phone buzzed.
It was a notification from the Desert Ridge Neighbors Facebook group.
Tracy Pruitt posted: “Some people on Saguaro Lane called the POLICE on TEN CHILDREN for swimming. Let’s talk about who our neighbors really are. 😡”
