My neighbour poured a bucket of red paint over my car at two in the morning because I had her SUV towed. By half past seven there were three police cars outside her house — and then an officer crouched down by my rear bumper, looked at what the paint had eaten through, and told the other one to get me away from the vehicle.
PART 1 — DON'T WASH IT
Verna Dunlop and I had been at it about the driveway for six months.
There is a strip of concrete beside my garage on Kestrel Court, eleven feet wide, and it is mine. It is on the plat, it is on my deed, and the fence line on the survey runs four feet past it.
Verna has lived in that house since 1999 and she had been parking on it since before I bought mine, because the man who owned it before me was eighty-one and did not drive.
She called it "basically shared" and she said it in a tone that made it sound like I had suggested something vulgar.
I asked her nine times over six months. I put it in writing twice. I paid a hundred and eighty dollars to have the line marked because she said my survey was wrong.
Last Tuesday I had her SUV towed.
She came out onto her porch in a bathrobe and screamed across two lawns that I would regret it, and three houses on that street heard her.
At thirteen minutes past two on the Thursday morning I woke up to a metal noise.
I got to the bedroom window in time to see Verna Dunlop going across my lawn in the dark in a coat and boots.
There was a bucket lying on its side beside my car.
My SUV is white. It was not white any more. Red, across the hood, down the driver's side, across the back, and pooled on the concrete.
By the time I got a coat on and got out there she was inside her own house with the lights off.
I had no camera on that driveway. Nobody else was awake. There was nothing in the world that proved it was her except a bucket and a woman who had shouted a threat on a Tuesday.
I rang it in anyway at about half past two and gave her name, and the dispatcher took it and said an officer would be out in the morning, and I did not sleep.
At seven-twenty somebody hammered on my door.
I opened it expecting Verna.
There were three police cars on Kestrel Court and two of them were outside her house. Her garage door was up and two officers were in it.
Verna was standing barefoot on her own lawn in her pyjamas shouting that she had not done anything.
A third officer came up my driveway. Marisol Behn, on her tape.
"Ma'am, is the damaged vehicle yours?"
"Yes."
She looked at it for a while. At the red down the whole side of it.
Then she said, "Don't wash it."
"Why not?"
And before she answered, one of the officers came out of Verna Dunlop's garage holding a paint can, half empty, by the wire handle with a gloved hand.
I actually laughed. It came out before I could stop it.
I said, "Well. There's my proof."
Neither of them smiled.
The older one had come up the drive by then. Sergeant Osgood Lind, mid-fifties, and he was not looking at the paint can.
He said, "This isn't about your car."
Then he asked me when I had bought it.
"Three years ago. Why?"
He walked the length of it slowly and then crouched down at the back, by the rear bumper, on the driver's side.
The paint had run down there and sat, and where it had sat, something had come away. There was a patch about the size of a hand where a white coating had gone soft and lifted, and underneath it the metal was a different colour.
And there were letters scratched into it.
Not printed. Scratched, with something sharp, by somebody who was not being careful.
Sergeant Lind wiped at them with his thumb and then with the edge of a glove.
He looked at them for about four seconds.
Then his radio went, and he said something into it that I did not catch, and he listened, and he read those letters out loud into it.
And then he stood up.
"Behn. Get her away from the vehicle."
I said, "What's going on?"
PART 2 — THE MEETING IN OCTOBER
I need to go back six months, because the driveway is not a small thing in this and it is the reason there were three cars on that street.
I bought that house on Kestrel Court four years ago. I am forty-one, I am a project scheduler for a bridge contractor, and I bought it on my own after a divorce, which in that neighbourhood took about eleven months to stop being the thing people knew about me.
Verna Dunlop has been in the house next door since 1999. She was a school secretary for twenty-six years and she retired in 2020, and she is, and I am being fair, the person on that street who notices when somebody's mother is unwell.
The driveway strip was not a misunderstanding. She knew. She had a copy of the plat; her husband had one from a boundary thing in 2007.
What she had was twenty-six years of it being hers in practice, which in a street like that is a form of ownership that does not appear on any document and that is extremely real.
In the October there was a neighbourhood association meeting in the community room behind the fire station. About thirty people.
It is a meeting about drainage and speed bumps. It has no authority over anything.
I went because I was tired and because I had decided to be reasonable in public, which I now think was my actual mistake.
I brought the survey. Printed, folded, in a plastic sleeve.
I got about a sentence out — that I wanted to raise something about parking on Kestrel and that I had the plat if anybody wanted to see it — and Verna came out of the third row.
She took the sleeve out of my hands. Both hands, no hesitation, the way you take a menu off a waiter.
She folded it in half and held it down at her side.
And she said, to thirty people:
"Give me that. You've been here four years. That drive was shared before you turned up and it'll be shared after you've gone. Now sit down."
The room went quiet.
Thirty people. A man from the corner house who had helped me move a freezer in the March. The woman who runs the little library box.
Nobody said one word.
And I sat down.
I want that in the record because for six months afterward I told myself I had been the reasonable one, and I had not. I had been the silent one, which is different, and then I had spent the winter escalating in writing instead of speaking.
The towing was on a Tuesday and it cost me two hundred and eleven dollars, which I did not get back, and I want to be honest that when I made that call I felt fantastic for about ninety minutes.
I should set out the six months in between, because the version I told people at the time was tidier than what happened.
After that meeting I stopped talking to her. Completely. Four years of good morning across a fence and I ended it in one week, and she noticed, and she started doing it back.
Then it went into writing, which is what people like me do.
The first letter was polite and had the plat attached. The second one was less polite and mentioned my attorney, who I had not engaged and had no intention of engaging.
In the January I put a cone out. She moved it onto my lawn. In the February I put two cones out and she stacked them by my bins.
In the March I started photographing her vehicle on that strip with a timestamp, and I did it for eleven weeks, and I have forty-one photographs of a neighbour's car that I will never do anything with.
That is the part I am least proud of. Not the towing. The eleven weeks of standing at a bedroom window at half past six in the morning with a phone.
There was also a thing in the April that I did not understand until much later.
She came over. Actually came to my door, first time in five months, and stood on the step and said she wanted to sort it out, and that her husband had had a diagnosis in the February and she could not be doing with this on top.
And I said — and I remember exactly how I said it — that I was very sorry to hear that and that it did not change where the line was.
She looked at me for a second and then she said all right, and went home.
Her husband Royce died in the September, four months after the paint.
I did not know about the diagnosis until I heard about the funeral. She had told one person on that street and it was not me and I had had my chance in April and had used it to talk about a survey.
None of that excuses a bucket of paint at two in the morning and she has never once offered it as an excuse.
I am putting it in because it is true and because I have had to stop telling a version of this in which there is one unreasonable person on Kestrel Court.
PART 3 — M R O 7-14
I did not find out what was on that bumper for eleven hours.
Those eleven hours were the strangest of my life and I spent most of them assuming I was in trouble.
They put me in the back of a car. Not under arrest — Officer Behn was clear about that twice and said it in a specific way that I now understand was her being careful — but in the back of a car, on my own street, at twenty to eight in the morning, in a bathrobe, while two more vehicles arrived.
Across the road, Verna Dunlop was being spoken to on her own lawn about a paint can, and neither of us had any idea that the paint can had stopped being the point about four minutes earlier.
I watched her look over at me in the back of that car.
I have wondered what she thought was happening. She has never said and I have never asked.
They took the car. Flatbed, at about half past nine, with a tarp over the back of it, and I stood in a bathrobe on my own drive and watched my SUV leave on a truck.
Then everybody went, and Kestrel Court was empty, and it was ten past ten on a Thursday morning and I had no vehicle and no explanation and a red driveway.
I rang my office and said there had been an incident at home. I rang my sister and could not explain it. I stood in my kitchen and looked up three or four combinations of words that all brought back nothing.
At about two in the afternoon I went out with a hose and a brush and got as far as turning the tap on before I remembered the officer saying don't wash it, and I stood on that concrete for a while and then went back inside.
Sergeant Lind came back at about eight that evening with a detective from the county and they sat in my kitchen and asked me a great many questions about a private sale I had made three years earlier.
I bought that vehicle from a man off a classifieds site. Twenty-one thousand four hundred dollars. He called himself Curtis and he met me in a supermarket car park in a town forty minutes away and he had the title and the keys and a story about a divorce.
The title was clean. It was a real document with a real VIN on it. The plate came back clean. My insurer wrote it without a blink and I registered it and I drove it for three years and took it for oil changes.
The VIN on that title belonged to a vehicle that was crushed at a salvage yard in 2018.
What I had been driving since then was a different car entirely, carrying that dead car's identity: plate, title, dash tag, door sticker. It is called cloning and it is not rare and there is an entire industry doing it.
The car I had actually been driving belonged to a man called Desta Otieno.
He was forty-four. He was an HVAC estimator. He was taken off a forecourt on the eleventh of November 2019, at about a quarter past nine at night, in a town about ninety minutes from Loman Falls.
He was k.i.l.l.e.d that night. The vehicle went and was never found.
The investigation ran for about fourteen months and then it did not close but it stopped moving, which the detective explained to me is a different thing and is more common than anybody would like.
Now the letters.
In the July of 2018, Desta Otieno's daughter Mira, who was ten, scratched her initials into the paint on the rear bumper of her father's new car with a house key, along with the date, because she had seen somebody do it in a film.
M R O 7-14.
She was in enormous trouble. Her father was, by every account, furious for about two days and then made a joke of it for the next sixteen months and never had it fixed.
It is in the file. Her mother gave a statement in the November of 2019 that lists identifying features of the vehicle, and the last line of that statement mentions a daughter's initials scratched into the rear bumper on the driver's side.
Whoever re-identified that car did a proper job. New plate, new tag, new door sticker, a respray at the back where there had been damage.
They filled and coated over a set of scratches on a bumper because they were scratches, and they did it cheaply, and it held for six years.
Until a fifty-eight-year-old retired school secretary poured a bucket of exterior red over my car at thirteen minutes past two in the morning, and it sat on that patch for five hours and ate through the coating.
PART 4 — WHAT IT OPENED
I am not going to pretend I understand all of what happened next, because most of it happened in another county and I was told about it in pieces over about fourteen months.
The vehicle was the first physical piece of that case anybody had had since 2019.
There was material in it. I am not going to describe it and I have not been told the detail, and the detective was extremely careful with me about what she said, and I have been careful since.
What I know is that in the February two men were arrested in connection with an operation that had been re-identifying vehicles across four counties, and that in the June one of them was charged in relation to Desta Otieno.
That trial has not happened yet. I have been told I will probably be called about the purchase, and I have a folder.
I was not charged with anything. It was explained to me, twice, that a person who buys a cloned vehicle in good faith with a clean title is not committing an offence, and that it happens to several thousand people a year.
I lost the car. That is how it works. It was evidence and then it was property belonging to an estate, and it was never mine, and the twenty-one thousand four hundred dollars is gone and is not coming back because Curtis does not exist.
My insurer paid nothing, because there was nothing to insure. I had been paying premiums for three years on a vehicle that did not legally exist.
I take a bus to the park-and-ride now and I bought a nine-year-old hatchback in the spring, and I checked that one myself in four separate places before I handed over a dollar.
Verna Dunlop was charged with criminal mischief.
She admitted it in about eleven minutes once they had the can, and she pleaded, and she paid restitution for a car that was not mine to be paid for, which took the county six months to work out and which I have never fully understood.
She has not apologised for the paint and I do not expect her to.
What she did do, in the April, was leave an envelope in my mailbox with a printed page in it and nothing else.
It was the news piece about the arrests. The short one, from the county paper, three paragraphs.
She had underlined one line of it, and the line was the one that mentions that the vehicle was located in Adair County.
No note. Nothing on the envelope.
I have thought about what that was for about two years and I have never asked her.
PART 5 — SEVENTEEN
I met Yohana Otieno in the November of last year.
She asked for it, through the detective, and I said yes immediately and then spent four days being frightened of it.
We met in a coffee place halfway between, which is about an hour for each of us.
She is fifty-one. She talked about her husband for about forty minutes and I mostly listened, and then she asked me one question, which was whether the car had been all right.
I did not understand at first.
She meant whether it had run well. Whether it had been looked after. Whether the person who had it had kept the oil up and fixed things when they broke.
I said yes. I said I had it serviced twice a year at a place on Alder Road and that the air conditioning had gone in the second summer and I had had it done properly.
And Yohana Otieno said, "Good. He'd have liked that."
I have thought about that more than anything anybody has said to me in two years.
Mira is seventeen now.
She was not at that coffee place and I have never met her and I do not expect to, and her mother told me that she has known for a year that the reason there is a case is a set of initials she scratched into a bumper when she was ten and got shouted at for.
Yohana said she does not know yet what to do with that and that they are not rushing it.
I would like to say something about what Verna Dunlop did and I have written this paragraph four times.
She poured paint over a car in the middle of the night because a woman she had decided was a newcomer had her SUV towed off a strip of concrete.
That is all it was. There was no more to it than that and there is no version where she gets credit.
And it is also true that a homicide file that had not moved since 2021 is now a prosecution because of five hours of exterior red sitting on a rear bumper at two in the morning.
Both of those are true and neither one changes the other, and I have stopped trying to make them into a single sentence.
You've been here four years. That drive was shared before you turned up and it'll be shared after you've gone.
She said that to me in a room behind a fire station in front of thirty people, holding my survey folded in half at her side, about a strip of concrete eleven feet wide.
She was telling me that the way a street works is that whatever was there before you is the truth and you are a visitor.
She was completely right and she had no idea what she was saying.
May you like
Because what was on that driveway before either of us had any claim on it was a car that belonged to a man in another county who went out for petrol on the eleventh of November 2019, and whose ten-year-old daughter had put her initials on the back of it with a house key, and who nobody had been able to find for six years.
THE END
