A Camera In Place

The aluminum step stool creaked as Robert backed out two rusty mounting screws. He tossed the hollow plastic dummy shell into a plastic bucket on the deck and pulled the new black 1080p camera from its box.

Shade under the rear roof eave did little against the ninety-two-degree heat. Sweat trickled down his neck into the collar of his blue work shirt while he wired the low-voltage power lead into the soffit junction box. He tightened the swivel mount with a pocket screwdriver. A small blue LED light flickered twice, then burned steady.

He wiped his forehead with his forearm and looked down at the pool. The limestone coping shimmered in the midday glare. Three summers ago, during her second round of chemotherapy, Sarah had knelt on those white stones for two hours with a short stiff brush. Her hair had been gone under a blue bandana, but her jaw was set. She had refused to let the water turn cloudy. “If we don’t scrub the mineral crust today,” she had said, wiping salt from her eyes, “it sets into the rock forever.”

Robert carried the ladder back to the garage, his hands buried deep in his pockets, pressing his knuckles against the canvas fabric of his work pants. He picked up his phone from the workbench and synced the network settings to the internal drive. The system confirmed a six-second cloud buffer and active motion tracking.

Diane thought he was soft. She thought a widower managing shift schedules at a freight hub would back down the moment someone invoked subdivision rules.

He crossed the deck and pushed through the double-pane glass sliding door. The cool kitchen air hit his face. He set the phone on the granite island and reached for a glass from the cabinet.

The phone vibrated against the stone slab, buzzing three times in a row. A pop-up notification lit the screen, offering a live high-definition stream that framed the empty cedar patio planks in high contrast.

The midday heat sat heavy on the yard, baking the flagstones to ninety-two degrees. Up in the white oaks, cicadas buzzed in steady waves.