"That's my outgoing mail," I said. My voice sounded high and strange in my own ears. "I had two orders to ship. Paper. I put them in the box last night so the carrier would take them this morning."
Officer Kowalczyk walked to my mailbox. She put on a glove, opened it, and took out two padded envelopes. She read the labels aloud. One was to a bookbindery in Brattleboro, Vermont. The other was to a letterpress studio in Portland, Oregon.
"Oregon," Darlene said, as though the officer had found a severed head.
"It's paper," I said. "You can open it. Please. Open it."
The officer opened the Portland envelope carefully, with the edge of a key. Inside, between two sheets of chipboard, were ten sheets of cream-coloured kenaf paper, eighteen by twenty-four inches, with soft deckle edges, and a small handwritten card that said Thank you, Joan! The batch with the onion skin is on the bottom. — Nell. The officer read the card. She looked at the paper for a long moment. Then she slid it back into the envelope and resealed it with a strip of evidence tape from her pocket, which seemed fair.
"Do you have a camera?" she asked me.
I did. I had my doorbell camera. I had completely forgotten about it, because I'd been too busy being stunned. I pulled up the app with my thumb shaking. My stomach dropped at the list of overnight notifications: a raccoon at 2:31 (it hadn't been a person, but the camera had disagreed), a car at 4:58, and at 5:47 a.m., a single six-second clip, labeled Person detected.
I played it. The image was dim, still in its night-vision greyscale: the front walk, the driveway, and then, way off at the left edge of the frame where everything bent like the inside of a soap bubble, my mailbox post. Something moved at the bottom of it. There was a low, pale, fluffy shape, smaller than a cat, and above it a darker shape, crouched, partly hidden by the lavender. Then the clip ended. Six seconds. I had drawn my motion zone so carefully to exclude the street that I had excluded almost everything at the curb.
"That," Darlene said, leaning over my shoulder before Officer Kowalczyk could stop her, "is a raccoon."
"Raccoons aren't white," I said.
"It's a possum, then."
Officer Kowalczyk took my phone. She played the clip four times. She asked me to export it and send it to an email address she wrote on the back of a card. Then she asked Darlene to send her the full overnight footage from her own camera. "Not just the clip," she said. "All of it, from, say, ten p.m. to seven a.m."