"Go get your shoes on, Pip."
"But what garments?"
"Shoes," I said, and she went, slowly, the way kids go when they're planning to listen from the next room.
I walked the officers around the side of the house. It was early October in the North Carolina Piedmont, the air cool and wet and smelling of cut grass and somebody's dryer sheets, and the sun was only just coming over the tree line behind the wetland. My shed sat at the back left corner of the lot, eight by ten, painted a color the HOA had approved after two rounds of appeals called Heritage Sage. Behind it the ground sloped down toward the wetland strip. On the post by the back fence, twelve feet up, was a wooden owl box, and mounted on the same post a little higher, angled to look down at the box and the yard and the fence line, was a white camera dome.
Moreland saw the camera and looked at it for a second too long. I saw him see it.
I opened the shed door. The latch is a simple hasp with no padlock. Inside it smelled like gasoline and potting soil. There was the mower, the rakes, a stack of clay pots, a bag of black-oil sunflower seed, Pippa's old scooter, and, on the floor just inside the door, tucked against the mower wheel, a white paper shopping bag with twine handles that I had never seen before in my life.
"Is that yours, sir?" Alvarado-Pike asked.
"No," I said. "I have no idea what that is."
She put on a glove, which she already had in her hand, which I noticed. She opened the bag with two fingers. She didn't take anything out, but she tilted it toward the light so Moreland could see, and so could I, and what was in it was a tangle of satin and lace in a range of colors I can only describe as Department Store Valentine's Day. Black. Champagne. A sort of dusty rose. Something with a lot of small straps.
I'm a biology teacher. I can talk to thirty twelve-year-olds about the reproductive cycle of the frog without changing expression. I stood in my own shed and felt my ears go so hot I thought they might actually be glowing.
"Those are mine," Sheryl said.
She had followed us. She was standing at the gap in the fence by the roses, still in her robe, and her voice was very steady and very loud, pitched, I realized later, for the houses on either side.
"Ma'am, I'm going to ask you to stay on your side of the fence," Moreland said.