I did. Everybody does. Mine said PENDER MILL MIDDLE SCHOOL SCIENCE OLYMPIAD across the chest, and it was hanging, at that moment, on the hook inside my back door, where both officers could see it through the glass if they turned around.
They turned around.
They didn't arrest me. I want to be clear about that, because the neighborhood page was not clear about it later. What they did was worse in a way I didn't have a word for until afterward, which was that they were polite.
Alvarado-Pike photographed the bag where it sat. She photographed the shed, the latch, the gap in the fence, the camera on the post. She bagged the shopping bag in a larger evidence bag and wrote on it with a marker. Moreland took down my date of birth and my phone number and asked me where I worked, and when I said Pender Mill Middle School, he wrote it down and didn't look up, and that not-looking-up landed somewhere under my sternum and stayed there for a week.
"Sir, I'd strongly encourage you to preserve all of that camera material," Alvarado-Pike said. "Don't delete anything. A detective will be assigned and will likely be in touch about it."
"I'm not going to delete anything. I want you to have it. All of it. The full recording is on a box in my closet, the phone isn't—"
"The detective will be in touch," she said, not unkindly, and handed me a card with a report number written on the back.
Sheryl had gone back across her yard by then. I watched her climb her back steps, pause on the top one with her hand on the rail, and go inside without looking back. Her kitchen blinds, which faced my side yard, came down with a zip I could hear from forty feet away.
When I came back into the house, Pippa was sitting on the bottom stair with her shoes on and her backpack in her lap. She had heard everything. Of course she had. The back door had been open and she's my kid; she has ears like a fennec fox.
"Mrs. Kinsella thinks you stole her underpants," she said.
"Mrs. Kinsella is mistaken."
"Why would anybody steal underpants?"
"That," I said, "is an excellent question, and I don't have a good answer, and we have missed the bus."