Outside the night is still humid, the air close. Sweat beads at my hairline. Next door, Gene and Tony’s yard is bathed in spotlights, their house lit up like the spaceship in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Dad loved that movie, the mystery and the sense of wonder at the heart of it. When we watched it with Dad, Ethan talked about camera angles and movement, the physics of filmmaking, but I just snuggled next to our father and watched, wide-eyed and swept up in the story.

And now Dad is dead and my brother and I now have to deal with a different story in which Dad is a thief. I don’t know if the story is true or not, but I intend to find out. Starting with finding out who this Finn guy is.

I make my way into the thin strip of woods behind the houses on this street. The woods are in shadow, but the lights from Gene and Tony’s house allow me to see the drainage ditch that runs through the trees. I step over the ditch and walk a few yards through the woods until I reach the backyard of the house behind my brother’s, on the other side of the block. This house is dark, no exterior lights, and I hurry through the yard to the driveway and then to the street. No lights come on, no one shouts or calls out a warning—all the good citizens are asleep. I turn left and walk down the street, sticking to the sidewalk for now. Most of the houses here are dark as well, an occasional light glowing over a front door.

The road curves to the left and dead-ends into Ethan’s street. His house is to the left, a few lots up. Thankfully the nearest streetlight is maybe forty yards away, and at this street corner someone planted a row of hedges that’s now overgrown and gives me a place where I can crouch and surveil the area. I wish I had my night vision binoculars, but after a minute my eyes adjust. Ethan’s street runs arrow-straight about a quarter of a mile until it hits Roswell Road, and I have a straight line of sight down virtually the entire length of it. There isn’t a single car parked on the street, although several are sitting in driveways. A stranger wouldn’t park in someone’s driveway to surreptitiously watch Ethan’s house, not without risking a 9-1-1 call from a homeowner or a neighborhood-watch-type citizen, eager to report an imagined crime. So if someone is keeping eyes on Ethan’s house, they’d be doing it from somewhere hidden, behind heavy undergrowth, or maybe from a garage or storage shed.