I'll tell you this much. I watched it four times. Then I sat on the bucket in the dark closet with my hands over my mouth for a long time. And then I did the thing that, of everything in this story, I am proudest of, and which was very, very hard.
I didn't go next door.
I called a lawyer.
Rhoda Telfair had represented a teacher at another school in our district in a dispute with a parent who'd posted some things online, and the teacher had told me once, over bad coffee at a professional development day, that Rhoda was "like being represented by a very polite thunderstorm." She took my call at 8:40 that night from what sounded like a kitchen. I heard a dishwasher running.
I told her everything. The shed. The bag. The post. The leave. I told her about the camera system and the substream and the full recording, and I told her what was on the full recording, and when I was done there was a long pause, and the dishwasher clicked into its rinse cycle.
"Mr. Overbeck," Rhoda said, "I'm going to give you some advice, and you're not going to like it."
"Okay."
"Do nothing."
"Nothing."
"Don't post. Don't comment. Don't reply to Mrs. Haverty's comment with a thumbs up, however much you want to. Do not under any circumstances go next door. Don't show anybody what you've got: not your neighbors, not your principal, not your ex-wife. Tomorrow morning, you and I are going to make a forensic export of the full-resolution files from your recorder, with hash values, with the system logs showing they haven't been altered, and we're going to write down who touched what and when. Then we're going to give that, and only that, to the detective assigned to the case. We're going to let the police do their job, start to finish."
"She's telling four hundred people I'm a pervert."
"She is," Rhoda said. "And every single word she writes between now and the day that detective watches your footage is going to be an exhibit. I know it's hard. But you want this done right more than you want it done fast. If you go over there tonight and show her, she'll have a story ready by morning. If the police show her, she won't."