On the fourth day, a quiet Sunday evening when the security office was mostly empty, Delia let her sit at the terminal for exactly six minutes, just long enough to pull up the relevant clip and save a copy to a small personal drive Nora had brought specifically for that purpose. The footage was grainy, distant, shot from an angle that showed the locker room door, but not the interior. It showed a figure entering during the empty window, staying just under four minutes, then leaving.
The face was not clearly visible, not at this resolution, not without better equipment than Nora currently had access to. But it was something. It was proof that someone had been in that locker room during the exact window Joe’s bag had been tampered with. Someone who was very clearly not scheduled to be there. Someone whose build, even in the grainy footage, did not match anyone on the volleyball or cheer roster.
Nora did not show it to Joe right away. She did not want to raise hope over something incomplete, something that might not hold up to real scrutiny yet. She saved the file in three separate places. The personal drive, a folder on her laptop, and for good measure, a backup uploaded quietly to her university email account, the way her mother had taught her to always protect a source before you ever thought about using it.
She had a feeling, sitting there in the empty security office with the small drive warm in her palm, that she was holding something that would matter a great deal. Very soon. She was right.
By the following Monday, Joe’s suspension had escalated. What began as a routine review by Coach Marsh’s department had through channels neither Joe nor Coach Marsh fully understood, been pushed upward to the dean of students office. Preston Sterling had made two phone calls that weekend. Calls he would later describe, if ever asked, as simply checking in on his son’s well-being during a stressful week.
Both calls happened to land on the desk of Dean Harold Ingram, a careful, cautious administrator who had learned over many years at Asheford that certain names on the phone required a certain kind of attention. Dean Ingram called Joe into his office on Tuesday afternoon. He was not unkind exactly, but he was formal, careful with his words in the particular way of a man protecting more than one interest at once.
“Miss Callaway,” he said, gesturing for her to sit. “I want to be clear that nothing has been decided yet, but given the seriousness of the allegation and given some additional concerns that have been raised about your conduct this semester, the university feels it’s necessary to move this to a formal hearing.” “What additional concerns?” Joe asked evenly.