"The next morning," Ottoline said, in the voice of a woman reading from a document she had already written, "I went into Hesper's room to bring in her clean towels, and her dresser drawers were nearly empty. Her laundry hamper was empty. Her gym clothes were gone. Her... personal garments were gone. And when I went outside to check the camera, because I check the camera every morning, Sela, every single morning, this is what I found. And this." She reached into the inside pocket of her blazer and took out a small, clear, zip-top sandwich bag, and she set it on my kitchen table between the coffee cups like evidence at a trial, and inside it, folded into a neat square, was a single pair of girls' cotton underpants, light blue, with a printed pattern of tiny yellow ducks.
Radhika closed her eyes.
I looked at the ducks for a long moment. Something about them pulled at me. Then I said, carefully, "Ottoline. Those are clean."
"I'm aware they're clean."
"Somebody folded those."
"I folded them. I'm not going to carry my daughter's underwear around in a crumpled ball."
"No, I mean, look at them. They have a crease. They were folded before. Before they fell. Somebody took them out of a dryer and folded them into thirds." It was the kind of detail I notice. I fold scrubs for a living, practically. "Ottoline, they were in a bag of clean laundry."
"That," she said, "makes it worse. Do you understand? That makes it worse. That means he's been in my house. Our laundry room is off the garage. The side door is right there." She jabbed a finger at the edge of the frame. "He got into my laundry room, he took my daughter's clean clothes out of the dryer, and he carried them over the fence to your house. I don't know what for. I don't want to know what for. I want them back, and I want it to never, ever happen again, and I want Radhika to witness you agreeing that it never will. And I am still deciding whether to call the sheriff."