Chapter 3

3: 3

3

I flipped on the light. The window facing my bed had shattered, and a rock the size of a fist had rolled in and come to rest barely a yard from me.

Down below, a car alarm was blaring nonstop.

I got up, opened the door, and went downstairs. The car's windshield had cracked into a spiderweb.

When I looked up again, the field of rice out front, still unharvested, had been trampled flat, every stalk ground into the mud.

Those hundred acres were finished.

I photographed all of it, added the recording of my conversation with the mayor from earlier that day, bundled it together, and sent it to Lucas.

His reply came back at once:

"Intentional destruction of property. When the loss is substantial, the penalty is up to three years' imprisonment or detention."

As the sky was just turning gray, I dialed 911.

When the officers arrived, I stood in the yard and pointed at the glass littering the ground, at the gaping hole in the second-floor window.

Then I pulled up a stretch of security footage.

At 3:17 a.m., my cousin Dudley and my other cousin Clive Finch climbed over the wall into our yard.

They stomped the potted rosebushes my mother had planted, then bent down and picked up rocks, one aiming at the second-floor window, the other at my car, and hurled them.

When they were done, they spat on the ground and gave the camera the finger, mouthing plain as day: What can you do about it.

The evidence was complete. I brought the officers to Dudley's mother's house.

The officers laid it all out, and Dudley's mother dropped straight down onto the ground, slapping her thighs and wailing:

"This is unbelievable! Benjamin Cobb's daughter called the cops to have her own family arrested!"

Clive's mother had been waiting off to the side, and she sank to the ground too, crying along:

"You heartless girl! It was just a joke between cousins, and you actually called the police to have them arrested?"

"My Clive is an only child. If he goes in, his whole life is ruined. You're wiping out the Finch line!"

The villagers gathered to watch, some filming on their phones, some jabbing fingers at me and calling me an ingrate.

The loud aunt-in-law spoke first:

"We're all one family. The kids don't know any better, they smashed a couple of panes of glass, and you call the police? Is that really necessary?"

Aunt Cobb picked it up right after:

"That car of yours cost a few hundred grand. How much does it take to fix one pane of glass? The richer you get, the stingier you are."

The swaggering uncle spat on the ground:

"If the whole village didn't supply you, could you make that kind of money? You've raked in all the cash. So what if a few things got broken?"

A few of the older ones, sure of their seniority, still wanted to lay hands on me, and the officers held them back.

There was no one inside. Dudley's mother and Clive's mother flatly insisted they knew nothing.

They understood that if they dragged it out long enough, the whole thing might just blow over.

As for the hundred acres of ruined rice, there was no camera covering that area, so even if they denied it to the bitter end, there was nothing we could do.

The whole village watched me, their eyes full of smugness and greed.

I thanked the officers for their trouble and put away the report receipt.

Back home, I opened the GPS tracker on my phone.

The harvester I'd paid six hundred grand for was on the move, twelve miles away, in the next town over.

On the map it was tracking back and forth, clearly the pattern of a harvest run.

I let out a quiet laugh. The whole thing was absurd.

My mother was lying in a hospital bed waiting for brain surgery, my hundred acres of rice had been trampled into the mud.

And there they were, running my machine out there, pulling in five or six thousand a day.

But they'd forgotten. Getting the rice in wasn't the end of it. It still had to be sold before any money reached a pocket.

And it was harvest-aid season again.

I dialed the mayor of the neighboring village.

"This year's rural-aid livestream, I'd like to hold it in your village."