That second crash β the extra one, the one she swung purely because I was late to my own framing β was the one that shook my kitchen windows. That was the one that knocked the coffee loose in my hand. I have thought about that a lot since. If she had been a little more patient, or I a little slower with my coffee, the timing might have laid itself out differently. Instead, her impatience is preserved in high definition, with a timestamp.
On the video she stopped swinging and put her tool away for good. Then she walked behind the fountain, picked up the orange mallet she had planted there, and did something I will never forget as long as I live.
She wiped it.
She took a cloth from her pocket and wiped the mallet down β handle, grip, head β slowly, thoroughly, the way my mother used to wipe rainwater off the Reader's book. Then she carried it across the garden and laid it beside the broken base at a practiced angle, stepped back, looked at it, adjusted it once with the toe of her shoe, and nodded to herself.
"She's arranging it," Cole said, in the tone of someone watching a crime in a language they suddenly understand.
Then the woman took out her phone.
She did not call the police. Not yet. She held the phone to her ear and walked a slow half-circle around the fountain, and the camera under my eave, which I had installed mostly to catch raccoons, caught enough of her voice through its small microphone to ruin her life.
"It's down," she said.
A pause.
"No. He hasn't come out yet."
A longer pause. She looked at the house again.
"The duplicate is where we discussed. Once the police photograph it, Vale can use the incident."
My whole body went cold in a single wave. I looked at Cole. Cole was looking at the screen.
On the video, the woman turned slightly, and her voice cleared for a few words: "No intact Reader, no clean comparison."
Then: "Tell Adrian the base is broken too."
She ended the call, took several photographs of the statue she had just destroyed, and only then dialed the number that brought the sirens down my street.
9:19, the clock on the feed said. She had made that call at 9:19, to a number belonging to Vale Heritage Gallery, before she ever called the police, before I had taken a single step outside.
At 9:21 I appeared on the patio in the corner of the frame, all outrage and confusion, arriving precisely as cast.
Cole reached out and paused the video. The garden on the screen froze mid-morning, everything already over.
"Play the garage part," she said to me. "You said there's a camera in the garage, but I don't need the camera." She turned her head. "I need to see your mallet, Mr. Mercer. The real one. Right now."
The woman spoke for the first time since the screen had lit up. "This doesn't show what happened before," she said. Her voice had thinned out. "He could haveβ this is edited. Anyone canβ"
"Ma'am," Ruiz said, with enormous calm, "you're going to want to stop talking for a bit."
We went through the side door into the garage, all four of us, like the strangest tour group in Georgia. I pointed. Second shelf. Behind the paint tray, next to my father's chisels, exactly where I had sworn to Cole that it lived.
My mallet was there.
Cracked black grip. And wrapped around the crack β where I had repaired it myself, one-handed, holding the grip together with my thumb two summers ago β a band of gray electrical tape. Faded. Peeling at one corner. Mine.
"The one in the garden," Cole said, "has black tape. Fresh black tape."
"And different wear," Ruiz said. He was photographing my shelf with his phone. "Different markings on the head. Different serial stamp."
Two orange mallets. Nearly twins. Somebody had studied mine closely enough to buy its brother β and not closely enough to notice the color of my tape.
Behind us, in the doorway, the woman had gone the color of her jacket.
"Ms. Brandt," Cole said, and I learned her first name later, Sofia; in that moment she was only Ms. Brandt, "you told Officer Ruiz you came in off the sidewalk after you heard a crash. The crash was at nine seventeen. You walked through that gate at nine fourteen."
Ruiz held up his hand, ticking it off. "You placed a tool at nine fifteen. You made a phone call about it at nine nineteen. Mr. Mercer came outside at nine twenty-one. Your story has him destroying this statue before you arrived. The clock says you were finished before he knew you existed."
The silence in my garage was total.
"I want an attorney," Sofia Brandt said.
It was the smartest sentence she said all morning.