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yanked it shut behind me, the slam loud enough to wake everyone in the house and probably everybody on the street. And my pursuers stopped and began to laugh, high-fiving triumphantly, congratulating themselves at how easily they'd intimidated me. My heart was pounding, my face hot with shame.
    And there were the hookers. There was an area they worked fairly regularly, three streets to the east, and after that neighborhood's residents' association appeared before the city council and embarrassed the mayor into doing something about it, the police swept the area for several nights in a row. The residents proclaimed victory. They had driven the prostitutes from their streets. What they didn't know was that they'd driven them three blocks west over to ours.
    A woman who lived down near the corner who was a lot more politically active than I'd ever been got the ball rolling, drawing up a petition and getting nearly everyone on Crandall to sign it, but not before the street was littered with used condoms, and several Grade 2 students on their way home from school got an education in oral sex when they spotted a man getting his money's worth in the back of a Jetta. So the police did a sweep of our street, and the action no doubt moved westward again. At this rate, in about four months, the hookers would be working out of the Glen River and have to trade in their spike heels for hip waders.
    The principal at our kids' high school, using a massive set of bolt cutters, snapped the combination lock off the locker next to Paul's and found two handguns that had been used in a home invasion. The kid whose locker it was gets his daily instruction in a different institution now.
    One day, Angie said she was followed home by a guy in a long raincoat. We drove her to school for three weeks until the cops arrested some old guy for flashing.
    Another time, a sixteen-year-old broke into Mrs. Hayden's place, punched her in the face, and made off with her purse containing eleven dollars.
    I guess that's when I began hounding Sarah and Paul and Angie to make sure the front door was always locked. Not just when we were out. All the time. I demonstrated how, when anything of value was left near the front door, like a purse, anyone could step in, grab the item, turn around and be gone, and no one would hear a thing. Certainly not if we were upstairs, or in the basement. But even in the first-floor kitchen, you didn't always hear someone come in. We could be on one side of the wall while some stranger ripped us off on the other.
    And don't leave packages visible in the car, I said. Angie had a backpack she would leave on the front seat until she needed something from inside it later. "Someone'll smash the window to grab that," I'd tell her.
    "There's nothing in it," she'd say, convinced I was a total moron. "It's not like I get some huge allowance. There's no money in it."
    At which point I would explain that most thieves did not have X-ray vision, and wouldn't realize the backpack was worthless until after they'd smashed in the car window and run off with it. And Angie would roll her eyes and say something like "You are becoming totally paranoid, Dad. Isn't there, you know, some medication you could take or something?"
    And then there was Jesse.
    None of these signs of the neighborhood's deterioration prepared us for the murder of Jesse Shuttleworth.
    When I saw her picture on The Metropolitan's front page, I recognized her instantly. I had seen her, often, shopping at Angelo's with her mother. Five years old, curly red hair, a fondness for bananas. Loved to be read Robert Munsch stories, hated Barney the dinosaur.
    Last seen alive on a Wednesday afternoon, around four-fifteen, at the mini-park one block over from ours. Mother had looked out the window, seen Jesse on the swing, looked out again two minutes later, the swing empty but still swaying.
    After looking for her for half an hour, the mother called the police, and they swarmed the neighborhood.