She straightened up in her chair. “I have a tenant,” she said in a clear, unrestrained voice, not at all inhibited. “She’s renting one of my houses in Cambridgeport, and she’s on a campaign to destroy me.”
Toua nodded, accustomed to hyperbole from clients. “What’s she doing?”
“She’s trying to drive me insane. I asked her to move out. I gave her thirty days’ notice. But she’s refused.”
“You have a lease?”
“She’s a tenant at will.”
“Shouldn’t be too difficult to evict her, then.”
“You know how hard it is to evict someone in Cambridge? Talk about progressive laws.”
“It sounds like you need a lawyer, not a PI.”
“You don’t understand. Recently, she started sending me anonymous gifts. Like candy and flowers, then things like stuffed animals and scarves and hairbrushes and, you know, barrettes-almost like she has a
“How do you know it was her? Maybe you have a secret admirer.”
“Please. I have a lot of admirers, but she’s not one of them. I know it was her.”
“Well, the problem is, none of that’s against the law, or even considered threatening.”
“Exactly! You see how conniving she is? She’s diabolical!”
“Uh-huh.” He took a sip of his coffee. “Why do you think she’s doing these things?”
“I don’t know. I’ve been nothing but charitable toward her.”
“Although there was that minor thing of asking her to move out.”
“Look, something really strange has been happening. I got a high-meter-read warning from the Water Department. The bill last month was $2,500. You know what that amounts to? She’s been using almost ten thousand gallons of water a day.” She dug into her purse and produced the statement.
“This is grounds for eviction,” Toua said, looking at it. “Excessive water use.”
“That’s what I thought. But it’s not that simple. It could be contested as a faulty meter or leak or something, even though I’ve had all that checked out. She categorically denies anything’s amiss. You see what I mean? She’s trying to play with my
Ten thousand gallons a day. Toua couldn’t imagine. The woman had to be running open every faucet, shower, and spigot in the house 24/7, punching on the dish and clothes washers over and over, flushing the toilets ad nauseum. Or maybe experimenting with some indoor hydroponic farming, growing ganja.
“I guess I could do a little surveillance,” he said, giving the water bill back to Marcella Ahn.
“Round the clock?”
Toua laughed. “I have other cases. I have a life,” he said, though neither was true.
“I own another house on the same lot, a studio. The tenant just left. You could move in there for the duration.”
“You realize what this might cost?” he asked, trying to decide how much he could squeeze out of Marcella Ahn.
“That’s not an issue for me,” she said. “I want to know everything. I want to know every little thing she’s been doing or is planning to do, what she’s saying about the situation and me to other people, what’s going on in her life, a full profile. The more I know, the more I can protect myself. Your ad said something about computer forensics?” Business had gotten so bad, Toua had been reduced to stuffing promotional fliers into mailboxes, targeting the wealthy demographic along Brattle Street, where people could afford to act on their suspicions, infidelity being the most common. “Can you hack into her e-mail?”
“I won’t do anything illegal,” he told her.
“You won’t, or can’t?”
“Anything I get trespassing would be inadmissible in court.”
“Would it be trespassing if I gave you a key?”
“That’s a gray area.”
“As are so many things in this world, Mr.
Marcella Ahn, it turned out, was something of a slumlady. The house in Cambridgeport was a mess, a two- bedroom cape with rotting clapboards, rusted-out chain link, the yard over-flowing with weeds and detritus. The second house was a converted detached garage in back, equally decrepit. Toua spent two days cleaning it, bringing an inflatable bed and some furnishings from his storage unit to try to make it habitable.
The studio did, however, provide a good vantage point for surveillance. The driveway and side door were directly in front of him, and a couple of large windows at the back of the main house gave Toua a view into the kitchen through to the living room. He set up his video camera and watched the tenant.
Caroline Yip was an Asian waif, five-two, barely a hundred pounds. Like Marcella Ahn, she had spectacular butt-length hair, but it was wavy, seldom brushed, by the looks of it. She had none of Marcella Ahn’s artifices, wearing ragtag, thread-bare clothes-flip-flops, holes in her T-shirts and jeans-and no makeup whatsoever. She was athletic, jogging every morning, doing yoga in the afternoons, and using a clunky old bike for transportation; her movements were quick, decisive, careless. She chucked things about, her mail, the newspaper, dishes, flatware, never giving anything a second glance. Her internal engine was jittery, in constant need of locomotion and replenishment. Despite her tiny size, she ate like a hog, slurping up bowls of cereal and crunching down on toast with peanut butter throughout the day, fixing mammoth sandwiches for lunch, and stir-frying whole heads of bok choy with chicken, served on mounds of rice, for dinner.
During one of those first nights, after Caroline Yip had left on her bicycle, Toua entered the house. From what he had observed, he was not expecting tidiness, but he was still taken aback by the interior’s condition. The woman was an immense slob. Her only furnishings were a couch and a coffee table (obviously street finds), a boom box, a futon, and a few ugly lamps, the floors littered with clothes, CDs, shoes, books, papers, and magazines. There was a thick layer of grease on the stove and countertops, dust and hair and curdled food on every other surface, and the bathroom was clogged with sixty-two bottles of shampoo and conditioner, some half-filled, most of them empty. No photos or posters adorned the walls, no decorations anywhere, and there were no extra place settings for guests. She didn’t need companionship, it appeared, didn’t need mementos of her family or her past, reminders of her origins or her identity. She was a transient. Her house was a functional dump. Her attention resided elsewhere.
By poking through her bills, pay stubs, calendar, and checkbook, Toua gleaned several more things: Caroline Yip had no money and lousy credit; she taught classes at three different colleges as a poorly paid adjunct instructor; she supported herself mainly by waitressing at Chez Henri four nights a week; she had no appointments whatsoever, not with a lover or friend or family member or even a dentist, in the foreseeable future.
He downloaded her e-mail and website usernames and passwords and configured her wireless modem so he could access her laptop covertly, but there wasn’t much activity there, nothing unusual. Nor did her cell phone calls, which he was able to pick up on his radio scanner, merit much interest over the next few days, nothing more personal than scheduling shifts at work. She was a loner. She didn’t have a life. Just like him.
She was also, like Toua, an insomniac. On consecutive nights, he saw her bedroom light snapping on for a while, going out, turning on, which explained the dark circles under her eyes and the strange ritual she practiced in the mornings, meditating on the living room floor, beginning the sessions by trying to relax her face, stretching and contorting it, mouth yowling open, eyes bulging-a horrific sight. What kept her up at night? What was worrying Caroline Yip, preoccupying her?
She would end up supplying the answers herself. He supposed, given their proximity, that it was inevitable they would run into each other. The morning of his fifth day, as he was walking down the driveway, she surprised him by coming out the side door, laundry basket in hand. He thought she’d left on her jog already.
“Oh, hey,” she said. “You’re my new neighbor, aren’t you?”
They introduced themselves, shaking hands.
“Where’d you live before this?” she asked.
