They watched it after Lily was in bed, at the kitchen table, the laptop between them, the house quiet, and Dan took notes on a legal pad by hand, every entry timed.
The camera over the garage recorded in a wide, fish-eyed sweep, and it kept twenty days of footage in the cloud before it began, indifferent as weather, to record over itself. Dan was grateful β with a gratitude that felt absurd in its size β that he had never gotten around to changing a factory setting.
The day began ordinarily on the screen: dawn, the empty street, and Dan himself in the frame at six-forty with the watering can, touching the redbud's trunk as he passed it, the way a man touches a banister he has touched a thousand times.
He fast-forwarded. At nine-oh-two, a GreenEdge Landscaping truck entered the frame and parked at the curb. Dan stopped the playback and wrote down the time, and because Priya set her hand flat on the table and said, "Properly, Dan. Do it properly," he let the footage run at full speed and wrote down everything.
Nine-oh-four: three men out of the truck. The foreman β Dan would learn his name later; on the footage he was the one with the clipboard β stood a long time looking at the house. Nine-eleven: the foreman held the clipboard up and read it twice. Nine-sixteen: he raised his phone and photographed the clipboard, then turned in a half-circle and photographed the yard, trees and all. Dan heard his own breath go out of him. A man does not document a job he believes in.
"He knew," Priya said. "Or he half knew."
"He suspected enough to cover himself," Dan said. "There's a difference. It might matter, or it might not. Write it down."
Nine-twenty: cones out, chipper off the trailer. Nine-twenty-six: across the street, small in the frame, a figure on a porch β Eleanor Vance, holding something up at arm's length. Filming. Dan wrote that down, and underlined it.
And then, at nine-forty-one, came the detail that straightened both of them in their chairs. At the far end of Foxglove Lane, turning in under the oak by the mailbox kiosk and settling, a silver sedan. It stayed for the entire job. Nobody got out of it. On the footage it was too distant to read a plate, but its shape, its line, were as familiar to every homeowner as a signature: the same silver sedan that appeared at every HOA meeting and covenant tour, with its association decal in the rear window.
"That's Brenda's car," Priya said, in a voice of exhausted certainty.
"It is a silver sedan," Dan said, "that arrived at nine-forty-one, before the first cut, and did not leave until after the truck did. What we conclude and what we can say are two different piles. Keep them separate." But in the margin he wrote, in smaller letters: B.K. sedan β present throughout.
Ten-oh-three: the first tree went into the chipper. Neither of them watched closely. Dan advanced the footage in skips, noting the times: second tree, third, the stump grinder, the raking β the terrible raking β and at eleven-twenty, the truck pulling away with the last of his trees reduced to a bed of chips, on their way to become mulch in some stranger's garden. The sedan waited two minutes after the truck turned the corner. Then it, too, drove away, unhurried, the way a person leaves a place when they believe the whole matter is finished.
Dan closed the laptop, the way you close a book you intend to keep.
Then he did three things, in order, the way he had done everything since twenty past three. He exported the morning's footage and saved it to the laptop. He saved it again to the external drive from his desk drawer. And he uploaded it to the cloud account linked to Lily's school projects, in a folder he labeled not with anything dramatic, but with the date.
Three places. Three copies. Whatever happened next, the morning of the cutting would go on existing, exactly as it had happened, in triplicate.
Only then did he pick up the phone. He did not call Brenda. He did not call the HOA office, or the landscaping company, or anyone whose voice might tempt his to rise to match it. He called Eleanor Vance, who answered on the second ring with the promptness of a woman who had plainly been sitting near the telephone, waiting to learn whether anyone would ask her the question she had spent the morning making sure she could answer.
"Eleanor," he said. "It's Dan Whitaker. I wonder if you saw anything this morning."
"Daniel," she said, "I saw everything this morning. I have it written on the back of a grocery receipt, and I have it on my telephone, and you may have both. Shall I bring them over, or will you come to me?"
Chapter 10: The Lawyer