We did not sleep in the house that night, or for eleven nights after it.
My mother’s spare room has a single bed and a sewing machine in it and the three of us stayed in there like refugees while a detective named Aguilar worked through what had happened on Mercer Street. Ellie thought it was a holiday. We let her think that.
Aguilar was not what I expected. She was in her fifties, extremely calm, and she had the unusual habit of telling us things — actual information, unprompted — which I have since learned is not standard and which I think she did because she had worked out early that I was going to lose my mind if I was left to guess.
The first thing she told us was that this was not as rare as we thought.
There is a word for it, apparently, used more by journalists than by police. People living unnoticed in an occupied home. It happens in vacant properties constantly and in occupied ones more often than anybody would like to publish. Usually it lasts days. Sometimes weeks. Aguilar had personally worked two before ours, and in both cases, she said, the person in the house was not a stranger.
“That’s the part that surprises people,” she said. “It’s almost never a stranger.”
They found fingerprints in the roof space. A lot of them, on the milk crate and the buckets and the underside of the gable panel. They ran them, and they got a hit, and eight days after Dan took that vent off Aguilar came to my mother’s house and sat on the sofa and asked us both a question that I have never entirely recovered from.
She asked whether either of us knew a woman named Marisol Ferrer.
We didn’t. I was absolutely certain. I said no immediately and Dan said no a beat later and Aguilar wrote something down and then she turned her notebook around and showed us a photograph.
It was a driver’s licence picture, six or seven years old. A woman about my age, dark hair pulled back, the flat unhappy expression everyone has in those photos.
And Dan made a sound.
Not a word. A sound — an intake, like someone had put a hand on the back of his neck. I looked at him and his face had gone the colour of the wall behind him.
“She sold us the house,” he said.
She had not, technically. The house on Mercer Street was sold to us by an estate, through an executor, at a price forty thousand dollars under market — the motivated seller, the thing nobody would explain.
Marisol Ferrer’s mother had died in the front bedroom in February. Marisol had lived in that house for nineteen years, first as a child and then, after a marriage that ended badly, as her mother’s carer. She was not on the deed. She was not in the will. When the estate went to her mother’s brother in Arizona, a man who had not visited in a decade, he listed the house within a month and accepted the first serious offer, which was ours.
She had been at the open house. That was the detail that undid me. Aguilar checked the agent’s sign-in sheet, and there was a name on it, and it was hers, and she had walked through those rooms on a Sunday afternoon in April among fifteen strangers looking at the light.
I had probably stood next to her.
The key was the thing that made it real for Dan.
We had changed the locks. Everybody says change the locks and for once in our lives we had actually done it, the week we moved in, front and back, a man from a van, ninety dollars. So the question of how she was getting in had a locked-door answer and that was, in a strange way, comforting: she wasn’t coming in. She was going up the outside, through the vent, with her mother’s ladder, and staying up there.
Then Aguilar asked her one question and it stopped being comforting.
“Did you change the lock on the garage?”
We had not. It had not even occurred to us. The garage is detached, it holds nothing worth anything, and it has a side door with a cheap handle-lock that we had literally never used because the up-and-over door has a bolt on the inside.
Marisol Ferrer had a key to that garage. She had always had a key to that garage.
Which meant that for twenty-two nights, while I lay awake at 2:40 in the morning telling myself it was the house settling, a woman had been letting herself into our garage, taking her mother’s ladder out from under a tarpaulin, carrying it twenty feet across our drive, climbing to the gable end of the house we had bought out from under her, unscrewing four screws, and going inside.
And every single morning, before it got light, she had put the ladder back.