"I said, 'Sheryl, honey, I've known you twenty-five years, and in twenty-five years I have never once seen you hang anything on that clothesline but bath towels and your husband's undershirts.'" She sipped her ginger ale. "It's been deleted. She deletes things fast. But forty people saw it first."
I laughed. I didn't mean to. It came out of me like a cough.
"You have those cameras," Verna said. "The fancy ones. They show it?"
"The phone showed somebody in a hoodie. It's too dark and too small to see who."
"The phone." She tapped her binoculars. "What about the real thing?"
I didn't answer for a second.
"Grady Overbeck," Verna said, "you mean to tell me you've got a machine in your house that can count the whiskers on an owl, and you haven't looked at it yet?"
"I'm scared to," I said, and it was the first honest thing I'd said all day.
She looked at me for a long moment. Then she nodded, as though that was a perfectly reasonable thing to be.
"Go look," she said. "Whatever it is, you're better off knowing tonight than finding out from a detective."
That evening, after Lydia's car had pulled away with Pippa waving out the back window and her owl-print duffel bag on the seat beside her, I went to the hall closet and moved the vacuum cleaner and the winter coats and sat down on an upturned bucket in front of the network recorder, which hummed on its shelf with its little blue lights blinking, the way it had every night for a year and a half. I plugged a monitor into it directly, so that there would be no app, no phone, no substream, no compression, nothing between me and the full recording.
I'm not going to tell you what I saw that night. Not yet. I'm going to tell you what the detective saw, a week later, in my garage, with Sheryl Kinsella standing beside her, because that's the version that matters, and because I wasn't the only person in the room when it counted.