"Huh," said Moreland, from the doorway. It was the first thing he'd said.
"Your report," Quist said, still looking at the screen, "lists five items stolen from your clothesline, Mrs. Kinsella. Garments that you'd owned and hand-washed. Is it your practice to hand-wash your garments and hang them out to dry with the store tags still on?"
Sheryl didn't answer. I finally looked at her.
People say somebody went pale like it's a figure of speech. It isn't. I watched it happen. It started at her forehead under the visor and came down her face like a shade being drawn, until even her lips were the color of skim milk, and her hands, which had been folded in her lap, came apart and gripped the sides of the folding chair.
"I identified him," she said, faintly, to no one. "On the phone. I said that's him."
"You did," said Quist. "You said that's his sweatshirt."
The garage was very quiet. Outside, a leaf blower was going somewhere on the next street over. I thought of the hoodie on the hook inside my back door, PENDER MILL MIDDLE SCHOOL SCIENCE OLYMPIAD, and the plain gray one on the screen, which said nothing at all.
"There's one more thing you should see," I said.
Sheryl turned her head toward me slowly, as if her neck hurt.
"Things have been going missing from your porch," I said. "Since summer. Haven't they?"
She stared at me. And I saw something cross her face that wasn't fear, exactly. It was closer to hope. As if, for one second, she thought I was about to confess to that, and that it would make everything else all right.
"Since July," she said. "Three things. From the drying rack on my screened porch. A slip, and two—" She glanced at Doug, at the officers. "Two other things. I knew it. I knew they were going somewhere. I told Garnet, I told him, there's only one place they could be going—"