But within a few weeks, the for-rent sign was down, and two women moved in. Not wanting another set of neighbor relations to go down the crapper, we immediately introduced ourselves to Katherine and her room-mate Julie. They slowly moved in over the course of a few weeks, as Julie had to drive all her stuff down from Michigan. Things were going well. They captured a few of the stray cats left behind by the ex-neighbors, and cleaned up all the cat shit and dirt and trash left inside the house.

But there were a few disturbing things that we tried to ignore in the beginning, starting with the fact that they didn't seem to have any jobs. Katherine said that she ran a task service (you know, that short-lived fad where you hired someone to do all the things you didn't have time to do, like go to the dry-cleaners, or got the car repaired, or got the groceries, etc), but that seemed hard to believe, seeing as how she didn't even own a car. And Julie seemed to be working on her tan most days. Not that I had a problem with them parading around in cutoffs and bikinis all the time. It added a certain savoir faire to the neighborhood. Unfortunately, it also seemed to attract all sorts of attention.

In short, the people that were hanging around with them didn't seem to be inspiring role-models. They weren't mean or rude like our ex-neighbors crowd, but seemed to be mostly comprised of high-school drop-outs. If our street had alot of visitors before, it now became a veritable conga-line of cars and people constantly coming and going, at all hours of the day.

Some of the other things were just that - little things that fed our growing unease that our newest batch of neighbors weren't much better than the previous batch. Dumb things, really. The brand-new pick-up that Julie had driven down from Michigan was stolen. With the doors unlocked. With the keys still in it. With Katherine's purse in it. It wasn't even Julie's truck, but her ex-boyfriend's, who I can only assume was planning to pick it up someday.

Dumb things like when Katherine accidentally dropped a globe lightbulb from the second floor of her house onto our car (our driveway borders alongside their house), putting a slight dent in the roof of our econo-box car. Or when Katherine gave us a trash-collecting bill that was accidentally sent to their house - a week after she received it (we still had a few days to pay it). Or when we invited her over to our place for hurricanes - and she never showed.

Or the time we invited her over to our house for a big party - and they ended up throwing a big party of their own that same day. A party in which a window (bordering our driveway) was smashed out, leaving glass shards all over the driveway, and embedded in the sides of our other car. They didn't even sweep up the glass. We pointedly left it pushed into a pile, but eventually had to dump it ourselves (good things we paid our trash-collecting bill). When we confronted her about it, all she did was shrug and give us an "oh well" look. We swallowed it, and started to avoid them. It was the beginning of the end.

Julie was kicked out of the house when she couldn't pay the bills anymore, and a rotating cast of people (do we see a trend here?) started to move in and out of the house in the fall. There were long stretches of time when we didn't see anybody at all. During Thanksgiving week, we heard her dog crying and whining in the backyard, and no sign of Katherine. We seriously started to think that she was dead, and had vivid images of the dog mournfully guarding her lifeless body. Unfortunately, she turned up the following week.

This sort of went on, until December. After an especially long period of not seeing Katherine, a woman I hadn't seen before appeared shovelling the sidewalk after a brief snowfall. We exchanged a few words, and I inquired about Katherine, and the status of the house. I was told, with a laugh, that "she's long gone", and that a new bunch of people were renting the house. I never saw that person again (do we see a trend here?), and until I started to write these stories, I hadn't seen Katherine since.