Chapter 3: Eighty-Seven Seconds

My camera service kept the last thirty days of motion clips, and the damaged device had uploaded its final recording before losing power.
I sat at my father’s kitchen table and opened the app while Officer Reed waited across from me.
The first clip showed a delivery truck leaving at 6:12 the previous evening.
The next showed my empty driveway at 9:43.
Then came a clip from 2:16 in the morning.
A dark sedan rolled slowly past the house and stopped beyond the reach of the porch light.
A person wearing a hooded sweatshirt approached my garage from the neighbor’s side of the driveway.
The hood hid the person’s face, but something pale swung from the right wrist.
The stranger touched the garage door for several seconds.


When the figure stepped back, the initials had appeared beneath the camera.
“Pause it,” Reed said.
I froze the image as the person raised one arm.
A narrow bracelet caught the light.
It had a small silver charm shaped like a bird.
My stomach tightened.
Eli had given that exact charm to his girlfriend, Hannah Price, for her seventeenth birthday.
Hannah was now married, living two towns away, and raising twins.
I had seen pictures of her bracelet once in an old family album.
“Someone wants me to think about Eli,” I said.
Reed asked me not to jump to a conclusion about who wore the bracelet.
He played the clip again.
At the edge of the image, behind Vivian’s fence, a second person stood beside a parked vehicle.
The second person did not approach my property.


But when the hooded visitor returned, the car’s passenger door opened from inside.
“There are two people,” Reed said.
The clip ended as the sedan drove away.
Another recording began at 5:58 in the morning.
Vivian stepped from her garage carrying her ladder.
She looked at my camera before placing the ladder beneath it.
Then she looked toward the street, apparently waiting for a vehicle to pass.
Reed watched without comment as she climbed and lifted the hammer.
The sound of her first strike came through the laptop speakers.
My hands shook, but not because of the vandalism.
I was staring at the lower corner of the video.
Just before Vivian swung, somebody inside her upstairs window had held a sheet of white paper against the glass.
Three black words appeared on it.
PLEASE DON’T STOP.

Chapter 4: The Window

Reed watched the final frame twice before saying anything.
The lettering was large and uneven, written with a thick marker on ordinary printer paper.
The paper vanished when Vivian struck the camera.
“Who lives with your neighbor?” he asked.
Vivian’s husband, Malcolm, had died seven years earlier, and most people believed she lived alone.
But I had noticed a young woman arriving in a gray station wagon three evenings earlier.
She carried grocery bags through the side gate and had not come out again.
“Maybe a relative,” I said.
Reed asked whether I had seen her leave.
I had not.
He walked over to Vivian’s house while I remained behind my kitchen window.
She opened the door only a few inches.
Their conversation lasted less than a minute.
Then the door closed, and Reed returned.
“She says her niece is staying temporarily,” he told me.
“Does her niece want help?”
“Vivian says the young woman is recovering from an illness and doesn’t want visitors.”
I pointed toward the upstairs window.
“Then who wrote the sign?”
Reed studied the house and made a call from his car.
He said another officer would join him for a welfare check.
Before his colleague arrived, Vivian’s garage door opened.
A white utility van backed into the driveway and stopped with its rear doors facing the house.
A broad-shouldered man stepped out wearing a faded jacket with the name of a local restoration company stitched above the pocket.
I recognized him immediately.
Calvin Sloane had been one of Eli’s closest friends.
He had testified that he last saw my brother walking away from the railway party alone.
Calvin looked toward my house, saw the police car, and stopped moving.
Vivian came outside and spoke to him urgently.
He started back toward the van.
Reed walked across the driveway and called him by name.
Calvin turned slowly, with the expression of a man being asked a question whose answer he had practiced for years.
“Are you here to visit Ms. Rourke?” Reed asked.
Calvin said he was replacing a damaged basement door.
Reed asked where the new door was.
Calvin glanced at the empty cargo area visible through the van windows.
“I haven’t picked it up yet.”
The answer made no sense.
Then another officer arrived, and Vivian’s hand tightened around the porch railing.
The woman upstairs appeared behind the curtain for one second.
I saw part of her face before someone pulled her back into the room.
She looked like Hannah Price.