Alyssa stopped her before she touched them. They photographed the flowers, the package, the position of the porch camera, and the soil scattered on the mat. Nia remembered the strangers who had shouted from behind cameras at the jail. She wondered whether one of them had stood here, looking through the front window at her mother's framed photograph above the mantel.
Inside, a message waited on her answering machine. The caller had said nothing. The recording carried distant traffic and a single sharp whistle before the line went dead. Nia listened twice while Alyssa stood beside her. She had never thought of her home as a place where evidence might be found. Now she was cataloging objects that had been left to frighten her.
By midnight her dining table held three folders: the arrest, the detention, and the threats. Alyssa wanted her to sleep. Nia insisted on writing the timeline before fatigue made the details blur. She noted the start of the stop at 6:43 p.m., the wording of both claimed reasons, the young officer at the second patrol car, and the exact moment Halverson's hand moved out of sight. She described her position on the hood and the location of the witnesses. When she reached the dead flowers, she stopped for several minutes.
“You don't have to finish tonight,” Alyssa said.
“If I sleep, I will remember it again when I wake up,” Nia answered. “I'd rather have it written down first.”
She touched the watch beneath her sleeve. Her father had always kept a little notebook in the breast pocket of his work shirt. When buses broke down, supervisors sometimes blamed the last mechanic to touch them, and Elijah had learned to record every inspection, every defective part, every instruction he had been given. He used to say that memory could carry a person through the day, but a record could carry the truth through years. Nia had inherited that stubborn habit along with the watch.
At 1:47 a.m., her cell phone rang from an unknown number. Alyssa switched on a voice recorder before Nia answered. For twenty-three seconds they heard only breathing, slow and deliberate, followed by the faint scrape of something metallic and a click. The call ended.
Alyssa wrote down the time. Then she went to the window and saw a dark sedan idling across the street with its lights off. When the car moved away, she managed to capture only the outline and part of the rear plate. It was enough to make her uneasy, not enough to prove who had been there. Nia stood beside her and watched the empty space the vehicle left behind.
“They want me to resign,” she said.
“You don't know that yet.”
“I've presided over cases where people were pressured into leaving before an investigation could begin. The tactics look familiar.”