My hands were shaking so badly that I typed the wrong password twice.
The app rejected me with a cheerful little shake of its own, and I stood there on the patio with two police officers and a woman who had just accused me of smashing my own mother's statue, unable to remember a password I had used every day for a year.
"Take your time," Cole said.
"It's the dog," I said. "The old dog. His name and the year." My fingers found it on the third try.
The feed loaded. Four gray squares, then the garden bloomed onto the screen in that flat, slightly-too-wide security camera view: the fountain, the bench, the maple, the Reader standing whole and unbothered in the morning light.
I dragged the timeline backward.
9:02. Empty garden. A squirrel committed a crime against the bird feeder and left unrepentant.
9:09. Nothing. The sprinkler ticked its arc across the ivy.
9:14. The side gate moved.
Nobody said a word. Ruiz leaned in over my shoulder. Cole leaned in on the other side. I could hear the woman breathing behind us, and I did not turn around, because I wanted to watch her on the screen more than I wanted to watch her in person.
She came through the gate alone.
She carried a canvas tote bag in one hand and something long wrapped in a towel under the other arm. She did not hurry. She did not look around to see whether anyone was injured, which is what she had told Ruiz she came in to do. She looked at the house windows once, the way you check a mirror, and then she walked straight across the grass to the Reader, set the tote down by the fountain, and unwrapped the towel.
Inside the towel was the orange mallet.
"That'sβ" Ruiz began, and stopped.
On the screen, she carried the mallet behind the fountain and laid it down in the shadow of the basin, handle out, placed carefully, the way you set a place at a table. Then she walked back to the tote and took out a second tool. The angle didn't give us a clean look at it β something short and heavy, dark-handled. It did not matter. We were about to see what it was for.
She stood in front of the Reader for a moment. Four feet of bronze girl reading a bronze book, and a woman in a pale jacket measuring her.
Then she swung.
The first blow landed high, on the shoulder, and even through the phone's little speaker the sound was obscene β a wrong note struck out of an instrument. The Reader shuddered. The second blow hit her again and something cracked that had been whole since before my grandfather was born.
"Jesus," Cole said quietly.
The third blow tipped her.
There is a particular horror in watching a thing fall that you have only ever seen standing. The Reader pitched sideways off her wall, slow and then not slow, and came down on the base and the stones, and the base split with a report like a frozen lake giving way. Bronze pieces jumped. The arm went one way. The head rolled into the ivy and stopped face-up, exactly the way I had found it.
She did not stop there.
On the video she stepped in closer, among the fragments, and struck the fallen pieces again β the torso, the book, the base β methodical, unhurried, like a person tenderizing something. Chopping at a thing already dead. When she was satisfied she lowered the tool and stood looking at what she had made, and her shoulders went up and down once, a person catching her breath after honest work.
Nobody on my patio had moved in a while.
Ruiz's voice, when it came, was very flat. "Keep it rolling."
She put her own tool back into the tote. Then she zipped the tote closed, smoothed her jacket with both hands, and stood in the middle of my mother's garden in the wreckage of my mother's statue, and waited.
"What is she waiting for?" Cole asked.
I already knew the answer, and it made my skin prickle all the way up my arms.
She was waiting for me.
She had done the breaking. Now she needed the rest of the picture. She needed the owner to burst out of the house and be furious on schedule, because a destroyed statue and a calm owner is a mystery, but a destroyed statue and a screaming owner is a story, and stories are what people believe.
She looked toward the kitchen windows.
And when I did not come, she picked up her tool and went back to the pieces, and hit them again.