I knew Margaret Sloan disliked my clothesline. I did not know she hated it enough to destroy the clothes hanging from it.
My name is Eric Nolan. I was forty-seven that summer, living with my wife, Rebecca, and our fourteen-year-old daughter, Hannah, in a quiet subdivision outside Dayton, Ohio. We had owned our house on Willow Bend Court for twelve years. It was perfectly ordinary:
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Three bedrooms
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Two-car garage
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A fenced backyard
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A maple tree that dropped enough leaves every October to bury a small vehicle
And behind the garage, two metal poles with four clotheslines stretched between them.
The clothesline belonged to my grandmother. Not literally—the poles were newer—but the habit came from her. When I was a kid, my grandmother refused to use a dryer if the sun was out.
"Electricity costs money," she would say. "The sun is already paid for."
Rebecca thought that was funny. So after we bought our house, I installed a clothesline. Most of the neighborhood used dryers, and we used ours too. But sheets, towels, work shirts, and anything that smelled better after an afternoon outside went on the line. For eleven years, nobody cared.
Then Margaret Sloan became chair of the Willow Bend Property Standards Committee.
Suddenly, our laundry was apparently threatening civilization. Margaret lived next door. She was sixty-one, recently retired from a regional insurance office, and possessed the strange confidence of someone who believed every rule existed because she had personally approved it. Her lawn was perfect, her flower beds had labels, and her trash bins were returned to her garage approximately twelve seconds after collection.