The timer was not unplugged again. I don't know if that was the camera, or coincidence, or if Darlene had simply moved on. I found out soon enough that she had moved on, just not the way I'd hoped.
* * *
Gus Teague came over the evening after I installed the camera. He stood at the bottom of my driveway with his hands in the pockets of his canvas work coat and looked up at the little black lens by my door like a man looking at a new dog to see whether it bites.
"Welcome to the club," he said.
Gus was seventy-one and had spent forty years as a lineman for Idaho Power, climbing poles in ice storms. He had forearms like hams and the patient, unhurried manner of someone who has worked around things that can kill you. His wife, Junie, had died three years earlier. He kept her rose bushes alive with what I can only describe as grim devotion, and he kept a trail camera strapped to a fence post in the hedge at the corner of his front yard.
"What's that one for?" I asked him, pointing.
"Foxes," he said. A slow grin spread across his face, and he took out his phone to show me. "Vixen denned up in the drainage culvert there in April. Had five kits. They're grown now, mostly, but they still come through at first light, down the gutter line and across to the greenbelt. Look at this fella."
He showed me a grainy black-and-white infrared clip: a young fox trotting down the middle of our street at 5:12 a.m., stopping under a streetlight to scratch its ear with a hind foot, and trotting on, utterly unbothered, as if it paid dues. The camera was aimed down along the gutter and across the road. In the corner of the frame, I could see my own mailbox post and the clump of lavender I had planted around it.
"That's my mailbox," I said.
"That's your mailbox," he agreed. "You've got good lavender. The foxes like to pee on it."
"Thank you for telling me."
"Figured you'd want to know." He put the phone away. "She fined me in 2022 for my flagpole. Said it was two inches over the limit. So I cut two inches off the bottom and stuck it back in the sleeve. Took her four months to notice it was the same flag at the same height, because the sleeve was two inches deeper than the pole. She never did figure that out." He looked across the street, up the hill, toward the Fisk house. "It's not about the flagpole, though. It's never about the flagpole."