“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?—”