Chapter 10
CHAPTER TEN
“So, where do we find Tina?” Ida asked.
They were standing on the sidewalk outside Sloan’s Antiques, which was not a productive place to stand. Ida had found another mint. Helen was checking her watch. Nans was looking at the middle distance with the expression of someone running through options and rejecting them.
“I’ll check online,” Ruth said suddenly. She pulled her iPad out of her giant purse. “She’s always live-streaming maybe we can see where she is.”
Ruth’s fingers were already moving. Ten seconds later she held up the iPad.
Trash-to-Cash Tina was indeed live. She was mid-sentence about a cast iron doorstop shaped like a Scottie dog, her phone propped on something at chest height, her voice carrying the particular bright energy of a woman performing for an audience of forty-seven.
Behind her was a white fence, a big oak tree, and the very recognizable green shutters of the Pelletier house.
“That’s Oak Street,” Lexy said.
“Corner of Oak and Birch,” Nans confirmed. “Other side of the block.”
Ruth looked up from the iPad. “We can cut through.”
“Through what?” Helen asked.
“The backyards.”
Helen looked at the row of houses. “Whose backyards?”
“The Kowalski’s, the Fentons, and whoever bought the yellow ranch after the Garcias moved.”
“We can’t just walk through people’s backyards, Ruth.”
“It’s faster than going around.”
“It’s also trespassing.”
“It’s yard sale day, Helen. People are everywhere.”
Helen opened her mouth. Closed it. Looked at Nans.
“We’ll be quick,” Nans said, and stepped off the sidewalk.
The Kowalski yard was fine. Flat lawn, no dog, a bird feeder that Ida paused to admire until Ruth took her by the elbow.
The Fenton yard was less fine. Someone had recently turned half of it into a vegetable garden — raised beds, staked tomatoes, and a network of low wire fencing that was exactly the right height to catch a shoe.
Nans stepped over the first one cleanly.
Ruth stepped over the second. Helen made it through with the focused dignity of a woman crossing a stream in good shoes.
Ida did not make it over the third.
The wire caught her heel, she lurched forward, and would have gone down entirely if Lexy hadn’t grabbed her sleeve at exactly the right moment.
“I’m fine,” Ida announced to no one, pulling her sleeve back. “I meant to do that.”
The yellow ranch had a dog. It was small, enthusiastic, and threw itself against the inside of the sliding glass door with the energy of an animal that had been waiting its entire life for exactly this level of excitement. It did not bark so much as shriek.
They moved through that yard at a pace that could generously be called brisk.
They came out through a gap in a privet hedge onto Oak Street, slightly breathless, Ida trailing a small strand of hedge in her hair, Ruth holding the iPad aloft like a torch, all five of them arriving on the sidewalk in a cluster just as Trash-to-Cash Tina looked up from her cast iron Scottie dog and saw them coming.
Tina’s livestream captured the whole thing. Forty-seven viewers watched five women emerge from a privet hedge on Oak Street.
“We need to see your footage,” Ruth said. “From this morning.”
Tina looked at them. Looked at the hedge. Looked back at them. “Are you following my livestream?”
“Yes, it made you very easy to find,” Ida said, picking the privet out of her hair.
Tina stared at her phone screen, where the comment section was filling up rapidly. She flipped it around. “I need to go,” she told her viewers, “something’s come up.” She ended the stream, crossed her arms, and gave them the expression of a woman who had not budgeted time for this.
“I’m in the middle of a content day,” she said.
“We know,” Nans said. “We watched the first twenty minutes. This won’t take long.”
Tina’s van was parked at the curb — a white panel van with TRASH-TO-CASH stenciled on the side and a magnetic sign that had gone slightly crooked.
She pulled open the back doors, cleared a box of bubble wrap off a folding stool, and balanced her laptop on a storage bin.
Not ideal, but functional, which seemed to be Tina’s general operating principle.
Tina looked at them with the bright, slightly wary expression of a woman who recognized potential viewers but wasn’t sure what they wanted yet.
“I love what you do with the lighting with some of your videos,” Ida said. “The way you position the items so the sun hits them just right.”
Tina blinked. “Thank you.”
“And the way you had the Scottie dog against the fence,” Ruth added, with a straight-faced delivery. “Very natural. Very authentic.”
Tina looked at the dog. Looked at Ruth. “I just put it on the fence.”
“Exactly,” Ruth said.
Tina’s eyes narrowed. She looked at the hedge they’d come out of, then back at the five of them. “So that’s why you came? You followed my livestream, cut through two backyards, and came to tell me my lighting is good.”
“Three backyards,” Ida said.
“We actually think you might be able to help us,” Nans said. “With what happened to Everett Pike.”
Tina’s expression shifted — the wariness giving way to something more interested. Being sought out for help was a different thing entirely from being looked at sideways. “Help how?”
“You timestamp everything, don’t you?” Ruth said.
Tina straightened. “Start time, location, item description. It’s part of my system.”
Ruth was already beside her, eyes on the screen.
The first clip showed Tina at a table of miscellaneous kitchenware, narrating a set of silver nut dishes with the focused enthusiasm of someone who genuinely loved small silver dishes. The timestamp in the corner read ten-fourteen AM.
“That’s during the window,” Ruth said.
“I was there for eleven minutes,” Tina said. “The seller was chatty. I have the whole thing.” She scrolled. “Then here — ten-thirty-one, I’m at the book table. Here I’m at the furniture end looking at a blanket chest. I didn’t leave that section until after eleven.”
They watched in silence. Tina on camera, Tina’s voice, Tina’s timestamps. Continuous, unbroken, the alibi of a woman who documented everything because documentation was her entire business model.
“Everett was killed between ten and ten-thirty,” Ruth said.
“I have videos during that time.” Tina flipped through her listing of videos.
“What about this one?” Helen pointed to one at nine-thirty.
The footage showed Tina examining a pressed glass bowl, the yard sale stretched out behind her in soft focus.
Everett was visible in the background, moving between two tables, and even at that distance something about his posture was different.
He was moving faster. His head kept going down to his bag and back up.
“He looks excited,” Lexy said.
“Right?” Tina leaned in.
“He must have discovered the cat was valuable,” Ruth said. “Looks like he was looking it up on his phone.”
They watched Everett move through the background until he stepped out of frame.
“Can you go back?” Lexy said. “To that same clip.”
Tina rewound.
“There.” Lexy pointed. In the left edge of the frame, half-obscured by a rack of hanging coats, Margo Haskell was moving through the sale.
Her canvas tote — the big one, the farmer’s market kind — hung heavy on her shoulder, pulling the strap taut and tilting her whole posture to the left.
Whatever was inside it was solid and awkward.
“Keep going,” Nans said.
Tina scrolled forward. A different angle, Kyle Mercer visible near the edge of the Mercer driveway. He wasn’t helping, wasn’t browsing. He was standing at the corner of the house with his phone down and his eyes moving across the yard in a way that was more surveillance than sale.
Lexy watched him. He looked like a man watching something he was waiting on.
“One more,” Ruth said quietly.
The next clip was at the Mercer sale again.
Tina mid-sentence about a ceramic mixing bowl.
And there was Darlene Harrington, two tables over, her back half-turned to the camera.
Her hand went to a small object on the table — something flat, something that fit in a palm — and then her hand was in her coat pocket and she was moving on, smooth and unhurried, like she’d simply decided not to buy something.
Tina hadn’t noticed. She’d been talking about the bowl.
“Stop there,” Nans said.
The frame held: Darlene’s hand already in her pocket, her face turned just enough away.
“Did she just steal that from her own family yard sale?” Lexy said.
“I don’t know,” Tina said. “I wasn’t watching her.”
Ruth took the laptop, zoomed, adjusted, zoomed again. The object was gone before the camera caught it — just the impression of something small and flat. The right size to be a photograph. A key. A piece of jewelry.
“I can’t tell,” Ruth said.
“Neither can I,” Nans said. She straightened up. “But Darlene’s been searching that house for years. If she knew about the cat — if she knew something might be inside it—”
“She could have been looking for whatever was in that base all along,” Lexy said. “But how did it end up on the table and not in the cat? Unless this is another item and she was still looking for what was inside the cat.”
They looked at the frozen frame. Darlene, hand in pocket, already moving away.
Tina looked between them. “Is she the one?”
“We don’t know yet,” Nans said. “But she’s the question we haven’t answered.” She picked up her bag. “Thank you, Tina. You’ve been more useful than you know.”
Tina stood a little straighter. “I’ve been saying that for years.”
They left, back up Oak Street, the long way around this time. The dog in the yellow ranch was still at the glass door. It recognized them. If anything, it was more enthusiastic.
Ida waved at it on the way past.
It lost its mind completely.