Last Christmas, Shelley set up a wildlife camera to photograph the birds that came to her feeder. It was a gift from Jason, but now she is afraid to look and see what is recorded there. The birds looked so strange the one time she looked; she hadn’t had the heart to tell him that the camera he gave her didn’t show everything in color, like at the Audubon place, but in a gray fuzz, like a surveillance camera, like those eerie images of people at bank machines or convenience stores, like Princess Di and Dodi had looked in that last picture, or the young man who was murdered after getting money from the ATM; she’d worked that trial, too, his parents there in the front row.

Those pictures always look like a warning of something bad to come, perhaps because that’s when we see them, after the fact. After something bad has happened and then people are interested, then people pay attention, like at the trial when they studied the screenshots of that young man closely enough that they could see that, yes, there was a gun pressed to his head.

When Shelley looked at the footage that one time, there were squirrels, and a deer, way too thin—eerie and misshapen-looking—as it tried to eat the bulbs somebody else, maybe that old man or his dead mother, had planted.

“That was my room.” The man had pointed at the back window overlooking the side yard. “And I spent a lot of time there in that strip of woods.” He seemed relieved that that little bit of woods was still there, and so is she. When she moved in, her landlord said he and some others had fought to keep it; otherwise, their houses would practically be on the interstate. The woman, Lillian, had been waiting in the car that day, and she lifted her hand and waved at Shelley. She waved like she knew her, like maybe they had spoken a million times before. It gave Shelley a chill to think that; it reminded her of that old ghost story where the girl who died ages before in a car wreck keeps coming back home from the prom. But these people were real enough, because she saw the man’s face up close, where he had nicked himself shaving, and she saw him trip on the undergrowth and catch himself when he walked back near the tracks. They are real people, and she knows where they live.

Frank and Lillian Wishart. 524 Ivy Trail. She could ring their doorbell. She could show up and surprise them.

“He better be careful back there,” Harvey had whispered that day, shaking his head and holding on to her leg; he was wearing a beach towel around his shoulders and holding the lid to the trash can and a broom handle. “That’s where some of the bad ones stay.”