Chapter One: The Welcome

On the morning Daniel Mercer moved into the yellow house on Brier Lane, the woman next door arrived with a lemon cake and a warning disguised as an apology. She said the neighborhood had become unusually attentive since the trouble with the previous occupant. Daniel, who had not yet learned whether there was room in the refrigerator for a cake, asked what kind of trouble. The woman regarded the moving truck, the two men arguing about the dining table, and the roll of paper towels trapped beneath Daniel's arm. She decided against answering.

"You'll find we're very close here," she said instead. "Not physically. I mean, obviously physically. I mean we look after each other."

Her name was Evelyn Pike. She had a good haircut, the kind women maintain because it has once been admired by someone they no longer speak to, and she wore white gardening gloves without carrying anything that required gardening gloves. Before Daniel could object, she carried the cake into his kitchen and put it on the counter beside a carton of roofing screws.

Daniel had bought the house for less than it was worth. He had been told this by his agent, his lawyer, his brother, and finally the man who conducted the inspection, who treated the basement as an archaeological site and announced that the furnace was practically new. The price had seemed like compensation for his divorce, which had reduced the number of rooms in his life without reducing the number of memories. The house had a deep front porch, three upstairs bedrooms, and a view of a small park where nobody ever appeared to play. It seemed an acceptable place to become someone else, or at least to be seen by people who hadn't known him before.

Across the street, a man in a gray cardigan stood on his lawn watching the move. He was tall and narrow, with a face whose expression seemed to have been put on too early in the day. When Daniel raised a hand, the man raised his own a second later. Then he returned to trimming a hedge that was already perfectly rectangular.

"That's Arthur Vale," Evelyn said. "His wife is Miriam. Their daughter is Claire. We have supper together on Sundays."

"Is it mandatory?"

Evelyn smiled without looking amused. "Nothing here is mandatory."

She left him a handwritten list of useful telephone numbers: plumber, electrician, veterinarian, a woman named Caroline who could be called about anything. There was no number for the police. Daniel noticed this and then resented himself for noticing it, as though the omission revealed a man who expected police to become necessary.

By afternoon three more neighbors had arrived bearing food. A retired postal supervisor brought lasagna. A young couple brought a basket of fruit and carefully avoided saying where they lived. Arthur Vale himself appeared with a wrench Daniel had not requested. He held it out in both hands, almost ceremonially. "You'll need this," he said. "The upstairs radiator likes to pretend it doesn't understand English."

Daniel accepted the wrench. "Thanks."

"We've been waiting for someone good," Arthur said, looking past him into the house. "The last man didn't take to us."

Daniel wanted to ask what had happened to the last man, but Arthur was already walking away. The man's daughter stood at the upstairs window across the street. She appeared to be twelve or thirteen. A pale sleeve hung from the wrist of the hand she had pressed against the glass. Daniel could not tell whether she was waving or asking him to stop.

The first unsettling thing was not the question she mouthed at him after dusk. It was the fact that she knew when he would look. He had gone onto the porch with a beer and an unreasonable feeling of satisfaction at being finished with the moving boxes, even though they were still piled in the hallway. A car passed without slowing. On the far side of the street, Claire's face appeared behind the upstairs curtain. She raised a sheet of paper on which she had written in large black letters: DID HE ASK YOU YET?

Daniel stepped toward the porch steps. A light came on in the Vale kitchen, and Claire disappeared. At the same instant his telephone rang. It was Evelyn, calling to say that the neighborhood association had taken the liberty of arranging breakfast for him the next morning. She mentioned the bakery, the croissants, and the importance of starting the day among friends. She did not ask whether he wanted any of it.

After he hung up, he found a second note. Someone had slid it beneath the front door, neatly folded into thirds. The writing was smaller and less certain than Claire's sign. DON'T LET THEM MAKE YOU A GOOD NEIGHBOR. WE HAVE ENOUGH.

Daniel stared at the words until they became handwriting again, simple ink on ordinary paper. He had spent fifteen years as a municipal building inspector, looking at cracked foundations and illegal conversions and the ways people persuaded themselves that danger was someone else's problem. His training told him that peculiar evidence should be preserved. His recent life told him that every unwanted complication began with deciding to be helpful.

By ten o'clock the entire street was dark except Arthur Vale's garage. A low scraping noise came from behind its closed door, followed by a thump, and then the repeated soft clatter of something striking concrete. Daniel stood at his kitchen window with the curtains drawn to his nose. The garage light went out. A minute later Arthur appeared on the sidewalk in the same cardigan and walked, almost jauntily, toward Daniel's house carrying a covered casserole dish.

"I saw your light," Arthur called through the screen door. "Miriam thought you might be hungry."

Daniel looked at the dish and, for a moment, at Arthur's hands. The man's fingernails were perfectly clean. There was a damp patch on the cuff of his cardigan. Daniel felt his embarrassment arrive before his suspicion, which struck him as a remarkably efficient way of remaining civilized.

He had come to Brier Lane to begin again. Already three people had brought him dinner, a child had warned him not to trust them, and the man across the street was waiting to be invited inside. Daniel could still decide that the ordinary explanation was the correct one. He could also decide not to. Neither choice would make him less tired.