Chapter 6: The Camera in the Hallway
Dad found it in eleven minutes.
He got the stepladder from the garage, climbed up to the hallway smoke alarm, and unscrewed the casing with a flathead screwdriver.
Inside, fitted neatly behind the test button panel, was a small wireless device the size of a matchbook with a tiny lens and a micro SD slot.
The slot was empty.
"It transmits wirelessly," Vanessa said from the bottom of the ladder.
"To a receiver.
Michael would have the footage."
"How long has it been there?" Dad asked.
"Eight months."
He climbed down.
He set the device on the kitchen counter and looked at it.
"Eight months," he said.
"I didn't install it.
Michael did.
When he came to look at the — when he came to the house in March."
"You let him into my home," Dad said.
"I thought it was protection."
"For whom?"
She didn't answer.
I picked up the device and turned it on.
It was light.
Smaller than I expected.
Something that size, positioned where it was, would have captured everything that moved between the front door and the living room.
Every time my father came home.
Every time I visited.
Every conversation we'd had in that hallway for eight months.
"I need to call someone," Dad said.
He went to his study and closed the door.
I stood in the kitchen with Vanessa.
This was the first time we had been alone since before Dad came home.
Since before she had sl@pped me, before the bear, before Michael's name had entered the room and changed everything.
She sat down at the kitchen table.
I stayed standing.
"You really thought I was going to take the house from him," I said.
"I thought you might try."
"He's my father."
"People fight over property," she said.
"It happens in every family."
"Not this one."
"You don't know that."
"I know I never once consulted a lawyer about this house," I said.
"I know I never contacted the bank.
I know that everything you did to protect yourself from something I might do — I never did any of it."
She looked at the surface of the table.
"I know that now," she said.
"Did you know it before?"
A long pause.
"I think I chose not to look too closely," she said.
Dad came back from the study.
He had a notepad and a name written on it — his friend, a retired police detective named George Halloran, who had agreed to come over in the morning and look at the device.
"George knows someone in financial crimes," Dad said.
"The bank contact — the one Michael paid — that's a federal matter.
Wire fraud, potentially."
Vanessa looked up.
"Federal?"
"Bank fraud doesn't stay local, Vanessa."
"I didn't know he was going to do that.
I asked him to — to help slow things down if a claim was ever filed.
I didn't know he was going to pay someone."
"But you didn't ask," Dad said.
"You just let the forty thousand go and didn't ask where all of it went."
She pressed her lips together.
"Write down everything tonight," Dad said.
"Every meeting.
Every call.
Dates you remember, locations, what was said.
Put it all down.
If you cooperate fully and the bank and the authorities decide your involvement was secondary, that matters.
If they think you're hiding Michael, it doesn't."
"And what about us?" she said.
He looked at her.
Not coldly.
Not cruelly.
Just honestly.
"I don't know yet," he said.
"I'm going to be honest with you the way you should have been honest with me.
Right now I don't know."
She nodded.
She picked up a pen from the counter and pulled the notepad toward her and started writing.
Dad came and stood next to me near the kitchen doorway.
"You should stay tonight," he said quietly.
"Your old room."
"I don't want to be in the way."
"You're not in the way." He looked at the camera device on the counter.
"I'd feel better knowing you were here."
I stayed.
That night I sat on the edge of the bed in my old room, the one with the faded yellow curtains my mother had picked out, and I looked at the bear on the desk in front of me.
I had put the camera in it myself, three weeks ago.
A small device from an online shop.
Forty-two dollars.
I had installed it the last time I visited because Vanessa had said something to me on the phone the week before that I couldn't prove, and I had needed to be able to prove things.
I had told myself it was just in case.
I hadn't known it would catch all of this.
My phone lit up on the desk.
A number I didn't recognize.
I stared at it.
It rang four times.
Then stopped.
Then a text came through.
*You made a mistake tonight.
Both of you.
I'd think carefully about what comes next.*
Michael.
I set the phone face-down on the desk.
Then I picked it up again and took a screenshot and sent it to my father's number with one line: *He just texted me.*
The reply came back in under a minute.
*Don't respond.
Save everything.
George is coming at 8.*
I put the phone down and looked at the yellow curtains in the dark.
Outside, somewhere on the street, a car started.
May you like
Sat idling for a moment.
Then drove away.
