I pulled up the trail camera. The SD card files were in a separate folder, sorted by date. I'd found the clip on the second night of the eight days, scrolling back through the summer looking for nothing in particular, and I'd sat in the closet and laughed until I cried, and then just cried.
September 14, 3:12 a.m. The trail camera looked low and level at the dark hole under the corner of my shed. For a few seconds there was nothing but dirt and leaf litter and the curve of a sunflower seed bag. Then Marigold trotted into frame, the vixen, slim and gray, her eyes blazing white in the infrared, and in her mouth, trailing behind her like a bridal train, was a long black satin slip. She stopped at the den entrance and looked directly into the lens with an expression of supreme, criminal self-satisfaction. Then she backed into the hole under my shed, tugging, and the slip went in after her, inch by inch, until the last bit of lace hem vanished into the ground.
I switched to the owl dome for the same minute. At the edge of the black rectangle of the privacy mask over Sheryl's screened porch, there she was again, the fox, coming out of nowhere with her prize, trotting across Sheryl's lawn, through the rose gap, and home.
"Gray foxes collect things," I said. "Soft things that smell like people. The state biologist has a name for it. There's a torn corner on your porch screen, low down, by the downspout. I've seen her use it. I figure she's taken more than three things from you. I can show you the gloves."
Doug Mattingly laughed. It was a single, helpless, horrified bark, and he clapped his hand over his mouth immediately and turned away and stood facing my recycling bins.
Sheryl didn't laugh. She was looking at the fox on the screen, frozen with the slip in her teeth, and her face did something I hadn't expected, which was that it crumpled. Not with embarrassment. With something much older and tireder than that.
"Mother's porch had a hole in the screen too," she said. "Every summer. She'd never fix it. She said the wrens used it."
"Mrs. Kinsella," Quist said, and her voice was gentler now, but no less firm. "I'm going to ask you to come down to the station with me this afternoon, voluntarily, to talk about your statement. You're not under arrest right now. You're free to decline. If you'd like to have an attorney present, you're entitled to one, and frankly, I'd recommend it."
Sheryl stood up. She did it carefully, like a much older woman. She took off the visor, looked at it, and held it against her stomach with both hands.
"You don't know," she said. She wasn't talking to Quist. She was talking to me. "You don't know what it's like to stand at your kitchen window every morning and watch a stranger live in your mother's house."
"No," I said. "I don't."
"She planted those roses the year I was born."