"Usually somewhere else," she said. "A drop house. Sometimes it's your own address, if they're trying to beat the address check, but then they'd need somebody to grab it off your porch before you got home." She looked at my house, at the little black doorbell camera by my front door. "And you'd probably have seen that."
I said I probably would have, and I meant it, and I went downstairs that night and scrolled through May on the doorbell camera looking for a box I hadn't ordered. I didn't find one. There were deliveries, plenty of them, but they were mine, a set of tripod legs and some dog food for a dog I was watching for a client and a phone case for Maisie. I went back as far as the system would let me go, which was forty days, which only reached back to the second week of May. I didn't think about what that meant either. I didn't think about the fact that the account was opened on May third.
What I did think about, a little, was that Debra Pelletier was getting a lot of packages.
You couldn't help but notice. Her front porch was in the corner of my driveway camera's frame, and her driveway was right next to mine, and starting sometime that spring there were boxes on that porch every single day. Not one or two. Five, six, eight. Brown boxes and white boxes and the slick printed boxes electronics come in. Sometimes they were addressed to her. Sometimes, I would learn later, they were not. A white Sprinter van with no markings came every Tuesday and Friday evening around nine-thirty and backed up to her garage, and she'd come out with a hand truck stacked with boxes and the driver would load them, and the van would leave, and that was that.
I asked her about it once, in the driveway, in a friendly way. I said something like, "You're keeping the delivery guys busy," and she laughed, the quick bright laugh she used at meetings, and she said she'd started reselling. "Returns," she said. "Overstock. You buy the pallets, you fix up what you can, you ship it out. Vern's place is not cheap, Leland. You have no idea." She said it with her chin up and her eyes a little wet, and I felt like a jerk for asking, and I told her I hoped it was going well, and she said it was, thank God, it really was.
That was June. In July, a package disappeared off Folasade Eze's porch.
Folasade was a woman who did not lose things. She ordered a new blood pressure cuff for her sister and the tracking said it was delivered at 11:14 in the morning and when she came home from Pilates at 12:30 it wasn't there. She came across the cul-de-sac and knocked on my door and asked, very politely, whether my cameras could see her porch.
"Not well," I said. "The driveway camera gets the edge of it. Let me look."
We went down to my office and I pulled up the driveway camera for that morning, and there was the delivery van at 11:14, and the driver going up her walk, and the driver coming back without the box. And then the footage did something I didn't expect. It stopped.