This neighborhood watch horror story starts with a pecan pie and a friendly question about what time my truck left in the morning. By fall I had seen the captain’s notebook, and I knew why the families who “moved away” never came back for their things.
The first thing our neighborhood watch captain ever asked me was what time my truck usually left in the morning, so he wouldn’t “call it in by mistake.”
I thought that was considerate. That tells you how new I was.
My wife Renata and I moved to Lomax, Texas, in March of 2022. Lomax is a Hill Country town of about thirty-four hundred people, an hour and change west of Austin, with one stoplight, a burger stand called the Dairy Bar and a feed store that also does notary work. I’d taken a job as a lineman with the electric co-op there. Renata got hired to teach fourth grade at the elementary school.
We bought a house in a subdivision called Pecan Ridge Estates, which has no ridge and, as far as I could ever find, one pecan tree. It’s thirty-eight houses on a single loop road with one way in and one way out. Brick fronts, two-car garages, little live oaks staked up in every yard.
It was built in 2004, back when somebody thought Austin was going to sprawl all the way out to Lomax. It didn’t, so Pecan Ridge just sat there on its own, a mile outside town, like a piece of a suburb that fell off a truck.
We were in the house maybe four hours when Gene Ashby knocked.
Gene was about sixty-five, retired from the highway department, short and tan with a white flattop and reading glasses on a cord around his neck.
He was carrying a pecan pie. Store bought, but he’d put it on a real plate. Taped to the plastic lid was an index card that said Welcome, Lot 17! in neat block letters.
Not our address. Our lot number.
He shook my hand and said, “Hollis.” Then Renata’s. “Renata.”
We hadn’t told him our names. He told us he was the captain of the Pecan Ridge Neighborhood Watch, and also on the HOA board, and also, he said with a little laugh, “the guy who notices things.”
Then he asked about my truck.
I told him that as a lineman I didn’t really have a usual time. Storm calls could come at two in the morning. He nodded and took a pen out of his shirt pocket and wrote something on his palm. Literally on his palm.
“I’ll make a note,” he said.
The people in Pecan Ridge called him Clipboard Gene, but always nicely, the way you’d call a dog by a funny name.
He walked the loop every evening at seven and every morning at six. He knew everyone’s kids’ names and everyone’s dogs’ names. He jump started cars. He called you if you left your garage open.
When the Mendozas’ smoke alarm went off while they were in San Antonio, it was Gene who called the fire department and met them at the door with the key they’d given him.
Lots of people had given him keys.
That was a thing I learned pretty quick. “In case of emergency.”
Our neighbor across the street, a nice woman named Patrice Gilley, told us we should give him one too. “He’s a godsend,” she said. “Honestly. You’ll never worry about this house again.”
We didn’t give him one. Renata said she didn’t care for the plate.
The Notebook at the Block Party
The notebook I didn’t see until May.
There was a block party for Memorial Day. Folding tables, brisket, kids in the street. Gene was at the end of a table with a composition notebook in front of him, the black and white marbled kind.
He was writing in it while people talked. Nobody seemed to think that was strange.
I walked past behind him with my plate and looked over his shoulder. I wasn’t trying to snoop. It was just right there.
At the top of the page it said Lot 26. Below that, in that same neat block print, was a column of days and times.
Tue. 6:12 a.m. Silver Camry out.
Tue. 5:48 p.m. Camry in.
Tue. 9:30 p.m. Front lights off.
Wed. 6:15 a.m. Camry out.
It went on like that all the way down the page. And the page before. And, from the thickness of it, a lot of pages before that.
Gene saw me looking. He didn’t close it. He just smiled up at me.
“Helps me know when something’s off,” he said. “You can’t notice off if you don’t know regular.”
Patrice was sitting next to him. She laughed and said, “Gene’s got all of us in there. I’m boring. He told me so.”
Everybody at the table laughed. So I laughed too.
That night I told Renata about it, and she said what I’d been telling myself all afternoon.
Retired guy. Too much time on his hands. Probably harmless. At least nobody’s going to steal our packages.
And for a while, that’s what it was.
What the Neighborhood Watch Wrote About Lot 22
I want to tell you about the Dunaways, because they’re the reason I did what I did.
Kyle and Shawna Dunaway lived in Lot 22, two doors down from us. Late twenties, no kids, a blue heeler named Biscuit who barked at everything. They were the only people in Pecan Ridge who didn’t like Gene, and they didn’t hide it.
Kyle had written a letter to the HOA board about Gene walking up driveways at night with a flashlight. Shawna had put a sign on their door that said No Soliciting, No Watching. She showed it to me and laughed. She thought it was funny.
Patrice told me the Dunaways were “a lot.” The man at the feed store told me the Dunaways were “a lot.” Even the lady at the Dairy Bar window knew who they were, and she said they were “a lot,” and then she asked if I wanted whipped cream.
In early August, the Dunaways stopped being around.
I noticed because of Biscuit. That dog barked every single time my truck came up the loop, for five months.
Then one Monday, he didn’t. Tuesday, he didn’t. The house was dark both nights. Their cars weren’t in the driveway.
I figured vacation.
Then, on Tuesday night, I got a storm call. A transformer down off Ranch Road 1631. I left the house at 1:30 a.m., got about a quarter mile out, realized I’d forgotten my good gloves, and turned around.
It was 1:47 when I pulled back onto the loop. I know because the clock on my dash was the only light in the cab. I’d cut the headlights coming in, because Renata had a big day and our bedroom faced the street.
Gene’s truck was in the Dunaways’ driveway.
Gene was at the Dunaways’ front door.
I stopped where I was, with the engine idling, about forty yards back. I rolled the window down. I don’t know why. I think I wanted to hear him say something normal, like the house alarm had gone off, or the dog got out.
What I heard was their alarm keypad.
Four soft beeps. One for each number. Then the long tone that means disarmed.
He didn’t knock. He didn’t look around. He just went in, easy, like it was his own house, and shut the door behind him.
I sat there with the window down. It was hot, even at that hour. The cicadas had stopped.
All I could smell was the cut grass from somebody mowing that evening, and the exhaust from my own truck. I remember thinking I should turn off the engine because he’d hear it, and then thinking he already had.
The Dunaways’ front window lit up for about three seconds. Not a lamp. A flashlight, swinging across the ceiling. Then dark.
I got my gloves. I went to my storm call. I worked until noon. I didn’t say anything to anybody.
When I got home that afternoon, Gene was walking the loop. He came over while I was getting out of the truck, friendly as always.
“Dunaways moved,” he said. “Back to Lubbock. Some family thing. Real sudden.”
“They asked me to keep an eye on the place till it’s sorted.”
I asked him when they left.
“Oh, Sunday sometime,” he said.
Then he patted my truck and went on his walk.
The Letter to the HOA Board
I’m going to be honest about what I did next, because people have told me since that it was stupid. Maybe it was.
I called the Lomax Police Department. The chief is a man named Royce Pettit. I told him what I’d seen. He listened, he took notes, and he told me Gene Ashby had keys to half the houses in Pecan Ridge with the owners’ permission, and that the Dunaways had told several people they were thinking about moving back to Lubbock.
I asked him if anyone had actually talked to them.
He said, “Mr. Mabry, people are allowed to move.”
Then I did the second stupid thing. I wrote a letter to the HOA board, same as Kyle Dunaway had. I said I’d seen Gene enter a vacant home at two in the morning and that I thought the board should ask the Dunaways directly if he had permission.
The letter was read out loud at the September meeting. I wasn’t there. I was on shift. Renata went.
She said when they read my name, the whole room turned around to look at her.
After that, Pecan Ridge got very quiet around us.
Patrice stopped waving. The Mendozas stopped inviting us to their kids’ birthday parties. At church, the pastor’s wife hugged Renata a little too long and said, “We all just love Gene so much, honey.”
Somebody at the co-op filed a complaint that I’d driven a company truck “recklessly” through the subdivision at night. They pulled me off storm rotation for a month. Renata had a parent tell her, in the pickup line, that some people “don’t understand how things work in a small town.”
That’s the thing about Lomax. Nobody threatened us. Nobody was rude. They just closed.
Like a hand.
Thursday Night on the Front Porch
Gene came over on a Thursday night in October. It was 9:14 p.m. I was on the porch. He came up the steps and sat in the other chair like he’d been invited.
He smelled like citronella. He had the notebook.
He didn’t open it at first. He just set it on his knee and clicked his pen a few times.
“You were up at 1:47, Tuesday, August ninth,” he said. “Lights off, coming up the loop. I wrote it down. I write everybody down.”
I didn’t say anything.
“Folks here like things regular,” he said. “You’re not regular yet. But you could be.”
Then he opened the notebook and flipped through it, slow, so I could see. Lot 17. That was us.
Pages of it. My truck out, my truck in, Renata’s car, our porch light, the night we had a fight and she sat in her car in the driveway for forty minutes.
He had that. He had the time she went back inside.
He flipped past us. Past Lot 18, 19, 20. He stopped on 22.
Months of the Dunaways. Every time Kyle’s truck left. Every time Shawna walked Biscuit. Then the last lines.
Sun. 9:02 p.m. Both home.
Sun. 11:15 p.m. Lights off.
And under that, in the same neat block print, one word.
Moved.
That was all. No time. No truck out. No moving van.
I sat there looking at it and it took me a long time to understand what was wrong with it, and I think he waited for me to understand.
Gene wrote down every time anyone in Pecan Ridge left. To the minute. He wrote down when I went to get my gloves.
He never wrote down when they left.
He closed the notebook. He stood up. He said, “Tell Renata the pie plate’s no rush,” and went down the steps and out to the street, and started his evening walk an hour and fourteen minutes late.
The person who finally told me the rest was Dot Fenner, Lot 3, eighty-eight years old and the only original owner left in Pecan Ridge. Dot played dominoes every Saturday at the senior center, and I started driving her there after her license got taken away. Nobody else would give her a ride, because Dot, it turned out, was also “a lot.”
One Saturday in November, out of nowhere, she said, “You know Lot 9 moved away in 2009. Lot 31 in 2015. That couple in 26, before the ones there now, in 2018.”
I asked her how she remembered all that.
“Because they’re all the ones who wrote letters,” Dot said. She looked out the window.
“And none of them ever came back for their things. Not a lamp. Gene boxes it all up real nice and the HOA buys the house.”
“Board’s got first option. It’s in the bylaws.”
I asked her why she’d never said anything.
“I don’t write letters, honey,” she said. “I’m eighty-eight. I’d like to see eighty-nine.”
We moved out in January. Back to Fort Worth, near Renata’s sister.
We didn’t just leave. I made sure we were seen leaving. I hired a moving company with a big painted truck.
I posted pictures online with the date on them. I called my mother from the middle of the street on speakerphone and told her loud and clear what time we were on the road.
I stopped at the Dairy Bar on the way out of town and made sure the lady at the window saw us both.
Lot 17 sold in March. Not to the HOA. To a nice young couple from Round Rock. I hope they gave him a key.
I think about Pecan Ridge more than I’d like to. Not about Gene. I think about Gene the way you think about weather. I think about Patrice and the Mendozas and the feed store and the chief and the pastor’s wife.
Every one of them knew about that notebook. Most of them had seen the word in it. And they kept waving at him every morning at six, and handing him their keys, and laughing at the block party when he told them they were boring.
So I keep asking myself who the monster in Pecan Ridge really is. Is it the man holding the pen, or the thirty-seven households who were just glad it wasn’t their page?
Have a neighborhood watch horror story of your own?
Does your street have a neighbor who knows a little too much about everyone’s schedule? Share your neighborhood watch horror story, or any HOA horror stories from your own subdivision, in the comments below.
How scary was it?
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