The fourth set of wet footprints was the one that finally made me lose my patience.
My name is Michael Grant. I was forty-three that summer, living with my wife, Laura, and our two children in a quiet subdivision just outside Columbus, Ohio. We had owned our house for eleven years, but the swimming pool came much later. Laura and I had diligently saved for almost five years to build it.
It was nothing extravagant. It featured a simple rectangular shape, a concrete deck, and a small diving board. We surrounded it with a fence tall enough to satisfy both city regulations and Laura’s perpetual fear that every squirrel in Ohio might somehow find its way into the water.
Our kids absolutely loved it. Thirteen-year-old Sophie practically lived in the water throughout July, while our nine-year-old son, Ben, firmly believed that every inflatable object belonged in the pool, regardless of its intended use. I once found a plastic lawn chair floating near the deep end; Ben proudly called it a boat. That pool was certainly not the most valuable asset we owned, but it was ours.
That distinction, however, apparently meant nothing to Karen Whitmore.
Karen lived directly behind us. She was fifty-six, divorced, and had been our neighbor for about eight years. For the vast majority of that time, our interactions were practically nonexistent—a polite wave over the fence, the obligatory exchange of Christmas cards, and occasional, mild complaints about overhanging tree branches. Nothing memorable.
Then, one sweltering summer, Karen apparently decided that our backyard oasis was community property.
The first time I caught her, Laura and I had taken the kids to Cincinnati for a weekend getaway. Our security system sent a motion alert to my phone at exactly 3:18 PM on Saturday. I checked the live feed, expecting to see a delivery driver dropping off a package. Instead, there was Karen, casually walking through our side gate in a bathing suit.