"Is that a mouse?" Doug said.
"Vole," I said, before I could stop myself. "Meadow vole. You can tell by the tail."
Quist made a note.
Midnight. One. Two. Three. Four. The clothesline was empty all night long, four bare lines, beaded with dew by the end, catching the infrared like strands of a spider's web.
Sheryl said, "I may have been wrong about the exact time I hung them."
"Okay," Quist said. "Keep going."
At 5:37 a.m. I slowed it down to normal speed.
A figure came out of the black rectangle over Sheryl's patio, as if stepping out of a doorway into the world. A person in a gray hooded sweatshirt, hood up, carrying a white paper shopping bag with twine handles. The figure crossed Sheryl's lawn diagonally, toward the back corner where her yard met mine, toward the roses, walking quickly, head down.
"There," Sheryl said, but it came out much quieter than it had in my backyard eight days before. "That's him."
"Hold on," said Quist.
Halfway across the lawn, directly below the owl post, the figure stopped. And I'll never know exactly why, but I've always believed it was the Admiral. He'd been sitting on the roof of the owl box, and at 5:38 and twelve seconds, on the recording, he turned his head around and gave a single short descending trill, the little horse-whinny that screech owls make, and the figure in the hood flinched and looked straight up at the sound.
Straight up at the box. Straight up at the camera.