A Crime in the Neighborhood by Suzanne Berne Page B

and less like what happened in neighborhoods.
    My fifth-grade teacher, Miss Sullivan, had begun reading a few pages from
The Hound of the Baskervilles
every afternoon before the final bell while the class drew pictures in their notebooks or rested their heads on their desks. Those boggy, sulfurous moors haunted me like something out of a recurring dream; every afternoon I sank into them, my hair knotted by the wind, my eyes bleared with staring into the yellow night, relaxing only when I crept through the fog and the drafty gloom of the Baskerville mansion back into my seat at ClaraBarton Elementary School. Whenever Sherlock Holmes noticed a small detail, one I knew would turn out to be important later, I would grip the edge of my desk and hold my breath. One afternoon my face must have turned red because I heard someone laugh. Miss Sullivan looked up and fixed her maidenly trout eyes on me.
    â€œMarsha,” she said sadly. “Is there a joke you’d like to share with the rest of the class?”
    The trick, I realized, was to notice everything.
    And so it was that the day after Mr. Green, our new neighbor, moved in, I began keeping a notebook in which I documented my travels through our house. I noted the worn patches in the hallway’s Oriental runner, the scuff marks on the stairs, the scorch at the back of the lampshade in the living room. The screen was coming away from the screen door in one corner, curling away from the metal frame like a leaf. The volume-control knob had fallen off the hi-fi, leaving a forked metal bud. Steven had spilled India ink on the sofa, and if you turned over the left cushion, you found a deep blue stain shaped like a moose antler. I had never realized our house contained so many damaged things. Soon it seemed I couldn’t look at anything without finding something wrong with it.
    On the cover of my notebook, I wrote “Evidence.”
    Mr. Green was not an especially interesting person, but around this time I also began noticing him, at first casually while I sat on the porch. Every morning he left his house carryinga bag lunch and a thermos of coffee. He climbed into his car, carefully backed out of his driveway, then drove off down the street, keeping an eye out for children on bicycles.
    In the evening he returned, always at the same hour. Mothers would be calling through screen doors for their children to come in for dinner; in shirt sleeves and loosened ties, fathers dragged green garden hoses onto their lawns to water the shrubbery. I think he must have been between forty-five and fifty. His most distinctive feature, aside from the bald spot, was a long nose that seemed at odds with the pink anonymity of the rest of his face. This was the Mr. Green I began to follow every evening, and in reverse every morning as I sat on the screened porch listening to the catbirds squall in our crab apple tree.
    Mostly he moved methodically from his house to his car, or from his car to his house, only varying this pattern to mow his lawn with a chattering push mower, or to pull a few weeds that sprouted, always in the same place, beside his front stoop. On weekend afternoons he sat in his shady backyard, where an enormous copper beech rose like a waterspout from its pool of dirt. But other than his initial wave the day he moved in, we hadn’t exchanged any greetings.
    Then one Saturday evening that spring, as I crouched near the fence in our backyard, I heard a man’s voice say, “Hello there,” and I looked up to see a gray shadow; and then suddenly there was Mr. Green looming bulkily from behind a lilac bush.
    I’d been singing to myself as I built an ant village in the dirt in a shaded corner that I’d always considered absolutely secret. It made my heart turn to realize that someone had been watching while I constructed tiny ant ranchettes and ant apartment buildings and sang “Where Have All the Flowers Gone,” a song that always brought me to