I called Adrian Vale the next morning.
I did not plan the call. Planning would have made me polite, and I had decided sometime around dawn that polite had already been spent on this man.
"Did you send a photographer to my house?"
His reaction was instant and, I thought, well-rehearsed.
"I beg your pardon?"
"Sofia Brandt. She was at my fence yesterday with a camera, photographing my garden. She says insurance. Laura Bennett says she's done catalog work for your gallery. Did you send her?"
"Absolutely not." The offense in his voice was immaculate. "I have no idea what you're describing, and I resent the implication, Mr. Mercer."
"Do you know her?"
"Professionally. She has worked in this field for years."
"For you."
"She has worked for many firms." A fractional pause. "She has worked for me, on occasion. In the past."
There it was again. The careful tense. Not works for me. Has worked. In the past. A man arranging his words the way other men arrange furniture β nothing touching anything it shouldn't.
"Then why," I said, "is a woman who has worked for you photographing an object you offered to buy and then called a reproduction when I wouldn't sell it?"
"Mr. Mercer, I cannot answer for the movements of every freelance photographer in Georgia. If someone took pictures of your garden, it has nothing to do with Vale Heritage. I would ask you not to call this office again with accusations you cannot support."
He ended the call. Not slammed β placed. Even his exits were polished.
I stood in the kitchen with the dead phone in my hand and understood two things. First, that I had learned nothing he had not intended me to learn, which was nothing at all. Second, that I was done trusting the ordinary arrangements of my house to be enough.
That weekend I installed a camera under the rear eave.
I already had one over the patio door and one in the garage. The new one was small, tucked up under the roofline where the shadow of the gutter ran, angled down across the garden β the fountain, the statue, the side gate. It was not hidden, exactly. Anyone who stood in the garden and looked up long enough could probably have spotted it.
The thing about cameras like that is that people do not look up. They look at what they came for.
Grace, when I told her, approved. Laura, when I told her, went quiet in the particular way that meant she approved and was sorry approval was necessary.
Then nothing happened.
Three weeks of nothing. The mail came. The ivy grew. Grace drafted her report on seams and alloys and a foundry mark she could only half see. The exhibition moved forward on paper. Once or twice I caught myself standing at the back window in the evening, looking out at the garden the way you look at a sleeping child after a scare β not because anything is wrong, but because once you have imagined the wrong thing, the imagining stays in the room with you.
I hated that feeling. My mother had sat on that bench every evening for months after my father died, facing the Reader, finding whatever she found there. Grief, probably. Company. A figure who asked nothing and stayed. Now her son stood at the window above the same garden doing a security check.
Sofia Brandt did not return to my fence, as far as I ever saw.
Adrian Vale sent no more letters.
The quiet, I would learn, was not the end of their interest. It was the sound of a plan being given time to become careful. The camera under my eave recorded an empty garden, morning after morning β fountain, ivy, bronze girl reading in the changing light.
Then came the morning it recorded something else.
That is where this part of my story properly begins, though I did not understand it standing in the wreckage with police radios crackling at my front gate. The statue was in pieces. The woman who had photographed my fence was standing in my garden with a rehearsed sentence and photographs of her own. And the orange mallet beside the broken base said, to anyone who looked at it quickly, exactly what it had been placed there to say.
Understanding came slower, the way it usually does. It came with investigators who asked for records instead of impressions. It came with phone logs and invoices and a paper trail nobody had expected a garden crime to generate.
It started, as most of the real story started, with people asking who had paid Sofia Brandt, and when, and for what.