"Anybody," she said. "Anybody at all." And she turned around and went back to the table to help Kayleigh unplug the projector.
I walked home in the dark. It's about three hundred yards from the clubhouse to Towhee Court, past the playground and down Killdeer Way, and a few people passed me in their cars on the way out, and not one of them waved. When I got to my driveway I stood there for a while looking at the north side of my garage. The camera was up there under the eave, a little black cylinder, completely dark. No light. There was a pole light on the corner of the Pelletiers' house that came on at dusk on a timer, a cheap amber fixture, and it threw the side yard into a kind of stained yellow, and above it, on the second floor, the bathroom window was a square of pebbled obscure glass, the kind that shows you light and shape and nothing else. It was dark.
I didn't think she was lying, not yet. I thought maybe she was confused. Maybe it had been the reflection of something. A car going by. The pole light. A firefly; we get them along the canal some years. I thought, she's alone, she's been alone for three years with a husband who calls her by his sister's name, and maybe something in her has worn down to the point where she sees things.
Then I thought about the envelope in my hand. "Recording equipment and stored media." And I thought about lilac capri pants, and a canvas tote bag, and an outlet on the front of my house.
I went down to my office and didn't turn on the light, and I sat in the blue glow of the recorder's little status screen, and I pulled up Friday, July 18, on the driveway camera.
At 9:31 p.m., the white Sprinter van with no markings pulled into the Pelletiers' driveway and backed up to the garage door. At 9:33, the garage door went up. At 9:34, Debra Pelletier came out of the garage in a gray zip-up fleece and the lilac capri pants, pushing a red hand truck stacked with boxes. Six boxes. She went back in. At 9:38 she came out with seven more. The driver, a thin man in a ball cap who never once looked toward my house, loaded them through the side door of the van. At 9:41, while she was taking the third load out, she stopped and looked up, right at my camera, for about two seconds. Then she put her head down and kept going. At 9:47 the van pulled out. At 9:48 the garage door went down.
I watched it four times. I watched the moment she looked up at my camera eleven times. Then I saved the clip in three places, one on the recorder, one on a thumb drive, and one in an email to myself, and I sat back in my chair and listened to my own heart going.
She had said twenty to ten. She had said the bath. She had said a red blinking light, pointed at her window.
At twenty to ten she had been standing in her own driveway in a fleece, loading boxes into a van, looking up at my camera with an expression I can only describe as calculation.