Just the week before, someone had pulled up in a white van and let out a bunch of kids who fanned through the neighborhood to sell magazine subscriptions, supposedly to help the kids pay their way through college in another state. Why college students from another state would show up where we lived, selling magazine subscriptions during the semester to fund their studies, I wouldn’t guess. But word quickly spread as neighbors posted about the kids, and someone even Googled the name of the company they said they worked for and shared information about how the entire thing was a scam.

Too often word spread in the group about anyone in the neighborhood who looked suspicious. All it took was for one young guy to walk down the street in a hoodie or with a baseball cap pulled low, and someone would jump on to warn us all that a “prowler” was in the area and we should all lock our doors.

I wondered if Jennifer’s neighborhood had a similar group—one that was at that very moment sharing a description of me wandering around in the vicinity of her house late at night in my basketball clothes.

Nevertheless, the group provided useful, if occasionally hysterical and unreliable, information about the goings-on on the nearby streets. So I logged on to see if anyone else had experienced someone in their yard earlier in the evening.

I hoped to see something. I hoped someone else’s yard had been invaded by an unknown guy who’d squished around in the soft mud beneath their windows. Maybe someone had seen a woman who looked like Dawn Steiner. But no one had reported anything more than a dog that had been incessantly barking early in the morning for two weeks straight.

So I posted about someone being in our backyard. I told the group that Amanda thought she’d heard someone in the backyard and maybe trying the door around eleven o’clock. Had anyone else seen or heard anything weird?

It surprised me how many people were still up at that hour. Did nobody else have anything to do after eleven thirty at night? Sleep? Watch TV? Have sex? Or was everyone like me, attached to their devices, fearing that they might miss something?

I quickly received a few replies to my post. One mentioned the barking dog again. One mentioned a fire hydrant near the park that leaked water day and night.

And then there was a comment that actually seemed relevant.

I didn’t know the guy who replied, but he gave the name of his street, which was three blocks away from us. He said they had seen a man in their backyard shortly before Amanda thought she heard the person at the door to our house. He described the man in a nondescript way. Medium height. Brown hair. Dark clothes. Nothing helpful.