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While she waited for her new tire, she flipped through a magazine from December of the year before.
The star on the cover posed with hands on hips and a forward slouch, quote superimposed over the photo reading, “I always want things dangerous.”
She leaned back, chair pressing the hard knot at the small of her back so uncomfortably she readjusted herself. How safe the world had to have felt to say such a thing. She couldn’t remember it ever feeling that way.
By the time she got home, the sun was orange, tangling low in the trees. Approaching the garage, she spotted the doe and fawn at the head of the trail just past the graveyard, perfectly still but for the puffs of steam out their wet black noses.
Her husband told their old joke, “If you don’t see deer around here, it means you aren’t looking hard enough.”
The alarm installer said, “Worst case, you would have gotten him on camera.”
Her mouth went dry as she was hit by what had gnawed at her the day before, the memory she hadn’t been able to grasp when she’d seen the deer bound away down the path. She turned off thecar, hand trembling. She’d failed to put it in park, started to roll backward before she slammed the brake, wincing with the way the impact hurt her injured foot. She stared out the windshield at the mother and her baby.
The wildlife camera was still somewhere out there in the woods, pointed at the forest path.
It would make sense, that the Corner had approached the house by using the path. There’d been no car, no tire tracks. He had to have walked. It would have been easy to park back on the cul-de-sac of McMansions unnoticed, and cut down to the house along the forest path.
Don’t get your hopes up. It’ll probably show nothing. It’ll probably be out of batteries. It’s been up how long? Over a year. And even if it works, he probably never went that way. But maybe. Maybe, maybe, maybe.
She pictured the Corner watching the house from the woods. But no matter how long he might have stood waiting, watching, he never would have seen the solar-powered wildlife camera in its camouflage case, hidden against a tree ten feet off the path.
But that camera might have seenhim.
33
She parked in the garage and hurried into the house to exchange her sneakers for snow boots, almost forgetting to disable the alarm so that it wouldn’t alert the monitoring services, the police. The installer had warned her that in the first weeks people often forgot.
“You got a wife coming in from shopping, yeah? Hands full of bags, all excited to crack ’em open, next thing she knows she’s missed a phone call from us, and the police are there.”
“I’ll remember.”
“Sure, course,” he’d said, and she’d disinterestedly clocked him looking askance toward his buddy, both of them pegging her as hopelessly damaged. Endlessly stupid.
And here you are, she thought, and smiled to herself,nearly proving them right.
Her excitement helped her move quickly despite her unhealed body. She walked out of the open garage door and toward the trail. Compared with her shoeless midnight race through the forest, without the weight of the officers by her side like the day before, using the trampled path the police had made felt light and easy. Under the low evening sun she traced carefully through the gravestones, recalling her previous fall. Made her way to the entrance of the path and tried to remember exactly where her husband had mounted the wildlife camera.
It was windy. Clumps of snow fell off treetops with each gust, leaving divots in the snow that made the woods, the path, even the pastures and graveyard behind her look as though an odd-footed army had moved through, gaits irregular and broken.
She left the shallow snow of the trail and moved into the drifts of the darkening forest, bits of ice slipping into her boots when she went in too deep. In her excitement she at first moved haphazardly from tree to tree, swearing at the hidden sticks and branches catching on her sweatpants.
You don’t remember where it was. That’s okay. It’s been, what, over a year? It must be out of batteries. Out of memory. Even with the solar panel, it couldn’t have lasted. Don’t get your hopes up. Be methodical.
She imposed an imaginary grid over the general area where she thought her husband had mounted the camera. She followed its lines, marched precisely as possible, her tracks growing into an appealingly even web behind her.
As she started to worry that her husband might have taken the camera down and failed to tell her, she saw it. The device blended in well with the tree trunk it was strapped to, but there it was, just below eye level. Her heart sank, seeing how the solar panel on top was partly covered in snow, how flakes had collected in the rim around the camera’s eye.
She wrestled with the thing, finally taking the mitten off her unhurt hand to allow her to pull the Velcro from around the tree.
Please, please, please, she prayed to no one in particular,let there be something, anything!
The device was similar to a digital camera, with its own two-by-three-inch screen in the back behind a hinged cover. It was more intuitive than she remembered, and smaller, easy to hold. She hit the “OK” button and the screen lit up, making her heart pound with hope.
She hit the button with a printed arrow pointing left and themost recent video played. The recording had been triggered by the motion of her own staggering self walking back and forth, searching, time-stamped 4:08 p.m., small digits indicating it had a twenty-minute run time.
She was so excited she had to stretch her fingers wide, shake out her hand, breathe deep to calm herself, before immediately clicking backward in time to see if she could find the Corner.
The next video was time-stamped 4:02 p.m. The doe and fawn, running away from her car. They were only partially obscured by the snow on the camera lens, leaping high and out of frame. She looked up at the sky, its near darkness. Had difficulty believing she had searched for the camera for only twenty minutes or so.
