I stood in the gravel of my driveway at seven in the morning, holding my keys. The autumn air in Oakridge smelled of damp cedar needles.
Gary Finch, my neighbor, was already out near the property line, sweeping Douglas fir needles off the asphalt with a stiff broom. He stopped and rested his chin on the handle.
I walked to the front of my thirty-year-old Buick sedan. The windshield was covered in a thin layer of fine gray dust, but right in the middle of the glass, something had cleared several tiny spots.
I leaned closer to the cold glass. They were small, distinct, star-shaped prints, no larger than a dime, arranged in a wandering line toward the roof.
“Gary, come look at this,” I said.
Gary walked over, his boots crunching on the wet gravel. He took off his wire-rimmed glasses and began polishing them with the hem of his flannel shirt.
“Raccoon,” he said, squinting through the clean lenses.
“No,” I said, tracing the air just above one of the marks. “A raccoon has five long toes. These have rounded tips. They look like tiny hands.”
Gary bent down, his knee joints popping in the quiet morning. He touched the edge of one print with a thick finger.
“Too small for a cat,” he muttered.
By half past eight, Beatrice, my daughter-in-law, was standing in my kitchen, setting a brown paper bag of groceries on the counter. The hum of my old refrigerator filled the space between us.
She tapped her manicured nails on her phone screen before sliding it into her purse. “I bought the low-sodium soup you like, Clara. You seemed a bit confused about the shopping list yesterday.”
“I was not confused, Beatrice,” I said, putting a carton of eggs into the refrigerator. “I was thinking about the driveway.”
“The driveway?” Beatrice asked, her voice rising in a cheerful, rapid squeak. “Is there something wrong with where you parked? You know, sometimes we forget which side we left the car on.”
I twisted my silver wedding band, but it caught on my knuckle. It felt tighter than usual, stubborn and immovable on my swollen finger.
“I always park in the same spot under the fir trees,” I said. “There are marks on my windshield.”
“Dust blows off the trees all the time, Clara,” Beatrice said, patting my arm with a cold hand. “It is easy to imagine patterns when we are lonely.”
She picked up her purse and adjusted her coat. “Julian says we need to look at your roof soon, but we should probably talk about your general comfort first.”
At two in the afternoon, Gary met me back at the car. The early morning sun was gone, replaced by a gray glare on the wet glass.
Gary pulled a metal measuring tape from his pocket and stretched it across the dusty metal of the hood. The yellow tape clicked against the wiper blade.
“The stride is barely two inches,” Gary said, retracting the tape with a sharp snap. “A neighborhood cat would leave wider tracks, and its claws would scratch the paint.”
“Could it be a squirrel?” I asked.
“A squirrel leaves claw marks, not these flat little pads,” Gary said, wiping a smudge of grit from his thumb. “And a squirrel does not climb smooth glass for fun.”
I looked toward the thick line of high native shrubs bordering the driveway. The damp leaves hung heavy and silent.
“Someone is doing this,” I said.
Gary did not answer. He looked down the road toward the highway, then back at my car.
Julian arrived just after dark. He sat on the edge of the armchair in my living room, rubbing the back of his neck while he looked at a contractor’s estimate.
“The roof repairs will cost more than we thought, Mother,” Julian said, pausing between his words. “Beatrice thinks we should get a full home appraisal. She says a private one is only four hundred dollars.”
