Lattimore looked at her for a long moment. Then he said, very gently, the way you'd tell someone their car had been towed, "Ma'am, we know exactly where you found it."
I've watched the recording of the livestream since. I think everyone in Larkspur Commons has. It ran for forty-one minutes before somebody, probably Sharon Pike, figured out how to turn it off. By then a hundred and fifty-three people had been watching, and several of them had saved it. At that moment in the recording, you can see Darlene's face from below, from the angle of the lowered selfie stick. It doesn't fall, exactly. It stops. Everything in it stops. Her smile stays in place, her eyes stay on the detective, and her chin stays lifted. For three, four, five full seconds she doesn't move. She doesn't blink or breathe. It's as if somebody somewhere had hit pause on her and forgotten to press play.
In the comment feed scrolling up the side of the screen, someone named Hal Brennan typed: oh no.
Then someone else typed: oh YES.
* * *
The search took two hours. The Safety Walk broke up in that time, slowly and then all at once, the way a crowd does when it realises it has become an audience. Sharon Pike dropped her flyers on my lawn and walked home with her hand over her mouth. The two men took off their reflective vests. The young couple with the stroller stopped at Gus's garage on their way back up the hill, and the woman said to me, very earnestly, "We really did just move here in August. We thought it was a nature walk." I told her it was okay, and gave her my card.
Darlene sat on her own front step between the hydrangeas, with Officer Kowalczyk standing beside her. She didn't look at her phone or at anyone. Duchess lay at her feet in the little yellow vest. Rick stood in the open garage with his hands in his pockets and watched an officer carry out a banker's box, the same brand I keep my files in, and set it on the hood of the sedan. Lattimore opened it, looked inside, and closed it again.
I found out what was in that box from the inventory attached to the warrant return, which Bev sent me three weeks later. I laughed so hard I had to put my head down on the lab bench, and Dr. Mehta came out of his office to see whether I was having a stroke.
The box was labeled, in blue ballpoint capitals, ARCHITECTURAL REVIEW COMMITTEE — APPLICATIONS 2019–2021. Under a layer of old paint-colour applications was a glass jar from Treasure Valley Green with about six grams left in it, a tin of gummies, and two more of the black child-resistant bags, empty and folded flat. The package number on the jar was one digit off from the number on the bag in my lavender. Same batch, same packaging run, same counter.
In the centre console of Darlene's white Lexus was a crumpled receipt from Treasure Valley Green dated Saturday, September 19th, a week before the police came to my door. Two 3.5-gram bags of an indica called Purple Sleep, one twenty-pack of gummies, cash, 11:42 a.m. Rick had spent that whole day at a turf seminar in Twin Falls. Darlene had turned off her phone's location history, but her camera roll held a selfie from 12:20 p.m. that day at the Dairy Queen in Fruitland, the first exit back over the Snake River from Ontario. She was holding a Blizzard and smiling. She'd posted it to her personal page: Little treat after visiting Sis!
Her sister in Payette, when Lattimore called her, said she hadn't seen Darlene since Easter.
They didn't take her away in handcuffs. Lattimore told me later he saw no need. She wasn't going anywhere, and she was no danger to anyone except herself and her reputation. He cited her there and sent the complaint to the county prosecutor. There were three charges. Possession of marijuana, a misdemeanor in Idaho, for the jar, the gummies, and the bag in my lavender, which the prosecutor argued she had possessed in every sense right up until she pushed it into the dirt. Making a false report to law enforcement, also a misdemeanor. And preparing false evidence, which in Idaho is a felony, because long before Darlene Fisk was born, the legislature had imagined someone very much like her.