“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?”