She was standing on the grass strip outside my side fence, on her toes, holding a camera up over the top rail.
I came around the corner of the house with a bag of mulch over my shoulder and nearly walked into the moment.
"Can I help you?"
She lowered the camera without hurrying. That was the first thing I noticed. People who are caught doing something innocent usually startle. People who are caught doing something else usually perform calm.
"I'm documenting property condition," she said.
"Whose property?"
"The neighborhood. Insurance work."
"What insurance?"
She smiled. It was a pleasant, professional smile that answered nothing.
"Property surveys. Condition reports. It's routine."
"You were aiming that camera into my garden."
"I take reference shots from the street line."
She was not at the street line. She was at my fence, on my grass strip, photographing through the rails at an angle no survey would ever need. From where she stood, she could see the garden. She could see the fountain.
And β though this only mattered later β she could see the open side window of my garage, and through it, part of a workbench and a shelf of tools.
"What's your name?" I asked.
"Sorry," she said. "Wrong address. I should be two houses down."
She said it easily, the way the calm had come easily. Wrong address. As if the correct address would have explained the camera, the fence, the angle, all of it.
She walked to a white compact SUV parked at the curb. No company markings. A temporary dealer tag where the plate should have been β the paper kind, the kind that tells the world almost nothing about who is driving.
I took out my phone and photographed the car as she pulled away. She saw me do it. Through the windshield, I thought I saw the smile again.
I sent the photograph to Grace first, with a message: Do you know this woman? She was shooting over my fence.
Grace replied within the hour: No. Should I?
I sent it to Laura.
Laura called me. Museum people and phone calls β I was beginning to understand the pattern.
"Her name is Sofia Brandt," she said.
"You know her?"
"I know the name. She's a freelance documentation photographer. Inventory work. She photographs collections for galleries, auction houses, private sellers. Condition reports, catalog images, that sort of thing."
"Insurance?"
"Not that I've ever heard."
"Who does she work for?"
"Whoever hires her. That's what freelance means." A pause. "But, Thomas β she has worked for Vale Heritage. More than once. Catalog photography. I remember her credit line in one of their publications."
The mulch bag was still sitting where I had dropped it by the fence. I stood there looking at the empty space where the white SUV had been.
"So Adrian Vale's photographer was taking pictures of my garden a month after he told me my statue was probably a fake."
"I can't tell you who hired her this time," Laura said carefully. "Freelancers take many jobs. But I can tell you it wasn't us, and it wasn't insurance work for any company I know."
"She said wrong address."
"Yes," Laura said. "They usually do."
She advised me to note the date and keep the photograph, which I had already done, and to mention it if anything else happened, which struck me at the time as an overreaction.
It was not an overreaction.
Here is what I did not put together that afternoon, and what investigators would assemble later, piece by piece. From my fence line, a person with a decent camera and a long lens does not just get a statue. She gets the layout of a garden. The gate. The fountain. The sight lines from the house.
And through an open garage window, she gets a shelf.
Second shelf. A paint tray. And an orange-handled masonry mallet with a cracked black grip, repaired by a man who had owned exactly one roll of gray electrical tape at the time he repaired it.
I had fixed that grip myself, four summers earlier, sitting on an overturned bucket, and thought nothing of it.
Sofia Brandt thought something of it.
But that afternoon, all I had was a name, a white car with a paper tag, and the uncomfortable feeling that my garden β my mother's garden, the private end of a quiet street β had become a place other people visited with purposes they did not announce.
I walked the fence line twice before dinner. Everything was locked. Everything was ordinary.
Ivy. Brick. The Reader by the fountain, reading to nobody.
I did not know she had already gotten what she came for.