The first officer through the gate was a woman in her thirties with her hand resting near her belt and her eyes doing the work before her voice did. Her partner came behind her, a broad man who took one look at the garden and slowed down, the way you slow down entering a room where something has already gone wrong.
The stranger reached them before I did.
"I saw the whole thing," she said.
The first officer looked past her, at the statue, at me. "Saw what, ma'am?"
"That man destroyed the statue." She pointed at me without turning around. "He lost his temper and he smashed it."
I laughed.
I want to be clear about that, because it was not funny and I knew it was not funny. It was the laugh your brain produces when a sentence is so completely backwards that it cannot find the shelf to put it on. I was still laughing when I realized both officers were watching me do it, and that a laughing man standing over a destroyed statue is not a picture that helps anybody.
"What?" I managed.
She kept going, steady as a weather report. "He was shouting. He was swinging at it. I heard the noise from the sidewalk and I came in because I thought somebody might be hurt."
"Lady," I said, "I have never seen you before in my life."
Officer Megan Cole β I read her name off her uniform later β raised one hand, palm out, and separated us the way referees used to separate boys on a playground. "Sir. Step over here with me, please."
I stepped.
Her partner, Officer David Ruiz, walked the stranger a few paces toward the fountain and took out a notebook, and I noticed she was already holding her phone out, screen lit, ready before he asked. People who have just witnessed something terrible usually need a minute to find their phone. She had hers up like a boarding pass.
From where Cole had placed me I could see the screen better than Ruiz could. She showed him photographs.
The first one was the Reader, already broken, fragments everywhere. The orange mallet beside the base. It was a good photograph. Framed well. Lit well. Taken, I realized, by somebody who photographs objects for a living.
The second photograph was me.
Me on the patio, mouth open, one arm raised mid-gesture, face red. I knew exactly which moment it was. It was me shouting What did you do? at a woman standing in my garden. Taken without the question, without the garden being mine, without her in the frame at all, it was a portrait of a man coming apart next to something he had just wrecked.
"When I started recording, he turned on me," she said, loud enough for me to hear every word. "He got aggressive. That's him yelling at me to stop."
"That's me finding you in my yard," I said.
"Sir," Cole said, not unkindly. "I need you to let me do this in order."
So I stood there in my own garden, in my socks getting damp from the grass, and answered questions in order. My name. My age. Whether the statue was mine. Whether the mallet was mine.
"There's a mallet like it in my garage," I said. "That one isn't mine."
"You're sure."
"I'm sure."
Cole looked at the stranger. "Ma'am, explain to me how you got into the backyard."
"I heard the crash," the woman said. "The gate wasn't locked. I came in to see if anyone was injured."
"And you took photographs instead of calling out?"
"I did call out. He didn't answer. He was too busy swinging."
It was beautifully built, her story. I will give her that, standing there listening to my own life being reassembled in the wrong order. She had entered after the crash. She had a reason to be there. She had pictures. She had a tool with my fingerprints practically glowing on it, in her telling, and a homeowner whose face, in her photographs, did all the arguing for her.
Ruiz closed his notebook and looked at me the way people look at a weather forecast they do not want to believe. "Mr. Mercer, is there anything else on this property that records?"
And that is when I remembered.
After the afternoon a month earlier, when I had found this same woman at my side fence with a camera in her hands, I had added one more camera to the two I already had. A small one. Tucked under the rear eave of the house, high enough that nobody ever looked at it, aimed down at the garden and the fountain and the Reader.
Aimed, as it happened, at everything.
"Yes," I said. My voice came out thinner than I wanted. "Yes, there is."
The woman's face changed for the first time since I had come out of my kitchen.
Not much. Just a small rearrangement. But I saw it.
"He's lying," she said quickly.
Ruiz ignored her completely. "Can you pull it up right now, sir?"
"Yes," I said. "Right now."