BUT LISTEN I AM HERE NO MATTER WHAT. PERIOD THE END. YOU CAN CALL ME ANYTIME AND I HOPE YOU WILL OK.

TREV

Underneath the TREV, he’d drawn a happy face. He’d also stuck a couple of happy faces, maybe as an afterthought, to lighten the tone, in the O’s of the final sentence. The HOPE and the OK.

I stood on the step and read it a couple of times until Kelli, standing beside me and wanting to be let inside, began to get huffy. I’d gone the whole day not thinking about Trevor — looking forward into the sunny new beginning represented by Gorsebrook tomorrow, as opposed to backward into the upsetting past of yesterday’s barbecue. It had felt like a psychologically healthy decision in the moment, but now, standing at our front door, I realized this decision had meant that in putting Trevor out of my mind, I’d done the same thing with my plan of changing the locks. And now it was too late in the day for that.

As I unlocked the door to let Kelli barrel past into the house, a high-voiced Hullo! sounded somewhere behind me. I turned to see Noel from across the street hurrying up the driveway. He wobbled with a slight, old-man limp indicating a bad knee or maybe a touch of bursitis.

“Noel,” he said, as if I wouldn’t have remembered him from the night Arun Gill’s garage was broken into, when he’d bemoaned his inability to defend the street with his locked-away Remington.

“Yes, hi, Noel,” I said.

My neighbour’s face was stern and officious, like a G-man’s. “Some asshole poking around your house this afternoon,” he said. “Thought I should let you know.”

I smiled and waved the note at him. “Yes — the asshole left a note. That’s ok — we know him.”

“Oh, I know him too,” said Noel, continuing to grimace. “Never liked the look of the prick, between you and me.”

I figured it must’ve been Noel’s hyper-vigilance when it came to neighbourhood safety that coloured his perception of Trevor — commingled with maybe just a hint of middle-class disdain. Trevor, he knew, didn’t live here. And didn’t look like he would live here. Therefore Trevor did not belong.

“He’s my sister’s care worker,” I explained.

“Well —” said Noel, dialing down the pugnacity a notch or two when he saw I wasn’t about to get up in arms with him. “I just thought you should know he was poking around when you weren’t here. I used to tell your mother the same thing.”

“You told my mother he was poking around?”

“Oh, he was in and out like he owned the place,” griped Noel. “My dad had workers looking in on him for years — he’d had a stroke in his sixties, made it hard to get around — but none of them had a key. No one was letting themselves in when he wasn’t around. She shouldn’t have allowed that.”

“Wait,” I said. “Did Trevor let himself in today?”