The money from Missionary didn’t go as far as I’d hoped, which meant taking the odd freelance assignment. I’d written articles for The Metropolitan (some futurist stuff, where the city would be in fifty years, that kind of thing), some magazine pieces. But with a nonexistent mortgage on the new house, we figured we could manage fairly well on Sarah’s income until my next ship came in.

So I worked from home, was there when the kids left for school and when they got home, and could be counted on most days to give Sarah a kiss goodbye before she left for the paper. It didn’t look as though that particular service would be required this day. All Sarah said as she headed out the door to the car was a simple “See ya.” Enough to let me know, officially, that she was out of the house, and that she wasn’t interested in any precommute snuggling. I watched from behind the curtain as she got out her keys, opened up the Camry, backed down the drive, and disappeared down the street.

WRITER’S BLOCK ARRIVED BEFORE NOON, so around eleven, on the way back from my walk along Willow Creek, I swung by the sales office for Valley Forest Estates. Phone calls hadn’t worked. Maybe a face-to-face encounter would be more effective where honoring a new-home warranty was involved.

The office was just as you drove into the neighborhood, a couple of mobile homes stitched together with an elegant front built around it as a disguise. I had a feeling that once the development was complete, they would pack up their fancy desks and high-tech photocopying machines and architectural models of the subdivision, rip out the trailers, and build one last shoddy house on the lot where it stood.

Okay, maybe that’s unfair. We’d had some problems with the house, but surely they could be fixed. I would turn on the charm with these dickheads.

As I entered the sales office, I glanced at the wood-paneled wall, where pictures of the various sales staff and company executives hung. I was looking for the guy who sold us the house. There he was. Don Greenway. The man our street was named for. Every day we basked in his celebrity. It was like living on Tom Cruise Boulevard and meeting Tom Cruise.

I approached the reception desk.

“Hello,” said a perky blonde woman in a white blouse, her hair falling down around her shoulders. “Welcome to Valley Forest Estates.”

“Hi,” I said. “I wonder, is Mr. Greenway in?”

“Do you have an appointment?”

“No. I was just hoping I might be able to catch him. I was passing by.”

“Were you thinking of purchasing a Valley Forest home? Did you want to see some of our brochures or take a look at our model homes?” She smiled the whole time she was talking, like an Entertainment Tonight reporter.

“No, we already own a home here,” I said. And the receptionist’s smile instantly vanished.

“Oh, I see. And what did you want?”

“Well, we’ve had a couple of problems and I wanted to see about getting them fixed.”

“Oh.” I had the sense that I was not the first person to come in here with a complaint. “Well, Mr. Greenway is very busy today, but if you’d like to leave your phone number with me, I’ll make sure that he gets back to you at his earliest possible convenience.”

“Well, that sounds great, but we had some trouble before, when we first moved in, with water seeping into the basement? And I had to drop by here several times before anyone came to take a look at it. And I’ve been in here before about our upstairs window, how I have to caulk it outside all the time, but the wind and the rain still manage to come through, and now our leaky shower has caused part of our kitchen ceiling to discolor, so there’s this big stain, you know? If it’s all right with you, I’ll just wait around awhile until Mr. Greenway becomes available.”

“Well, Mr.- What is your name, sir?”

“Walker. Zack Walker.”

“Mr. Walker, I assure you, Valley Forest Estates takes any problems you might have very seriously, and I will convey to Mr. Greenway your concerns and-”

The door to the office where Sarah and I had signed the deal to buy our house opened and out stepped Don Greenway, all five-foot-six of him, about forty-five, a bit of a paunch held back nicely by keeping the jacket of his expensive suit buttoned.

“Stef,” he said to the receptionist, “I wonder if you could get me the papers for-”

“Mr. Greenway,” I said cordially, extending my hand. “I’m so glad I was able to catch you.”

Stef said, “Yes, this gentleman, Mr. Walker, was waiting to see you. I explained to him that you were quite busy today but that we could set something up.”

“It’ll only take a minute,” I said.

“You look familiar to me,” Greenway said. “You’re on my street, at the corner of Chancery Park.”

“That’s right,” I said. “My wife Sarah and I.”

“You went for the upgraded carpet underpadding.”

Whoa. He was good. “That was us,” I said. “I wonder if you have two seconds.”

“I’m really on my way to a showing, but sure, go ahead.”

I told him about our most recent problem, the stained ceiling in the kitchen, caused by, I believed, water leaking from an improperly tiled and caulked shower stall on the floor above. “I think someone needs to come in and redo the shower, and once that’s done, fix the hole in the drywall in the kitchen. I understand these things are still covered for two years, if I remember the contract we signed and all.”

Greenway considered what I’d said. “You sure you’ve been using the shower properly?” he asked. “Because if you’re not, that could be your problem.”

“Using it improperly? We turn it on, stand in there, and shower. If there’s a wrong way to do that, we haven’t figured it out yet.”

Greenway shook his head, suggesting I didn’t understand. “Pretty long showers?” he asked. “I seem to recall you saying you have teenagers? You know how they can be, letting the water run and run and run.”

“Look,” I said, starting to bristle, “I don’t see what that has to do with anything. Water’s leaking out and wrecking the ceiling in the kitchen. And I think you guys should do something about it. This isn’t the first time we’ve had a problem, you know, and I don’t exactly think we’re the only ones in the neighborhood who’ve been having problems.” I thought of Earl, whose windows were often fogged up with condensation. I’d been meaning to ask whether he’d launched a complaint of his own. “My neighbor across the street, for example, all his windows, they’ve got moisture or something trapped between the panes, you can’t see through them, and-”

“I don’t have to listen to this. By your own admission, you’ve acknowledged that your teenagers are running that shower virtually twenty-four hours a day, so it’s no wonder some water may have spilled over the sill and that’s why you’re having the problem you’ve described.”

“By my own admission? I never said that. You just said that. What’s the deal here?”

Greenway’s cheeks were starting to get red, and a vein in his forehead was swelling. He was raising a finger to me, about to say something else, when he saw someone over my shoulder coming through the front doors. Now the finger was moving away from me and pointing to the newcomer.

“You get the hell out of here!” Greenway said.

I whirled around to see who he was talking to. I recognized him instantly as Samuel Spender, still dressed in his jeans and hiking boots, but this time wearing a white cotton shirt. He glared angrily at Greenway.

“I know what you’re up to, you son of a bitch,” Spender said. “You think you can buy them off but you can’t.”

“Get out! Get the hell out!”

Stef, the receptionist, was on her feet. “Mr. Spender, I’m going to have to ask you to leave or we’ll have to call the police.”

“Go ahead and call them,” Spender said. “I got lots to tell them.”