She came and stood behind my chair and looked at my screen, then at the printout in her hand, then at my screen.
"That's the same day," I said. "That's my picture, July second, seven in the morning. That's their picture, supposedly July second."
"That's not my house," Ruth said slowly. "Well, it is. But it isn't. That's not how it looks."
"It's how it looked," I said. "Some other time. Do you remember when Danny painted your trim?"
"Memorial Day weekend."
"And before that, it was peeling?"
"It was peeling for two years. Walt was going to do it." She stopped. "Walt was always going to do it."
I opened my archive and started scrolling backward through WH-1, my thumb on the trackpad, the buckeye flickering through the seasons in reverse like a movie: full leaf, flowering candles, the first unfolding leaves like green crumpled tissue, swelling buds — and then bare, gray, winter. I went back through March, February, January.
"Look," I said. "The lawn, in March. The trim." In my March pictures, at the left edge of the frame, Ruth's lawn was tan and dormant, as all of Ohio's lawns are in March. Her trim was peeling. The shrubs were ragged because nobody prunes boxwood in winter.
"Their picture was taken in the winter," I said. "Or very early spring. Late February to the end of March, if I had to guess, from the buckeye buds. They haven't broken yet. Our buckeye broke bud on March twenty-sixth this year — I have it written down. So before that." I tapped the printout. "Whoever took this took it months ago and put July's date on it."
Ruth sat down heavily in the chair beside me. "Why would anybody do that?"