It was a good photograph, actually, technically. Long lens, a little compressed. Me, from behind and slightly to the side, in my green rain shell and my wool hat, on the frosty greenway, with the camera raised to my eye, pointing away — unmistakably away — toward the pond and the line of yellow spicebush.
"That's the back of her head," Mulcahy said.
"She turned around," Karen said quickly. "After. She turned around and — "
"I did turn around," I said. "I turned around and saw a long lens in your upstairs window, Karen, pointed at me. And I turned back and took my backup frame of the spicebush and went home. If I'd photographed you, it'd be on that phone, wouldn't it? You'd have caught me doing it." I turned to Reyes. "Is there a picture on there of me pointing a camera at her house?"
Reyes was swiping again, slower now. Swipe. Swipe. I saw her jaw tighten.
"Mrs. Whitcombe," she said. "Where were you standing when you took these?"
"From my home. From my own property. I have every right — "
"This one," Reyes said, and turned the phone around, and held it up, not to me, but to Mulcahy. "That's not the greenway."
I knew which one it must be before I saw it, and when I saw it I felt my face go hot to the roots of my hair.
It was me in my own backyard, behind my own six-foot privacy fence, in late June, in the old nightgown I wear to fill the bird feeders, barefoot, with my hair down, reaching up toward the feeder pole. It had been taken from above, from an angle that cleared the top of the fence. There were others after it. Me in my sunroom, which is glass on three sides and faces the back of the lot, reading in the wicker chair. Me in the sunroom again, at night, lit up like a stage, in a bathrobe. Me in my kitchen, through the window over the sink.
Nobody said anything for a long moment. The furnace kicked on.