Four seconds. Five. My son knelt on our lawn with the lid open and did not move a muscle, and then he scrambled backward on his hands, and when he got to his feet he was shaking.
His face had gone completely white.
“Mom.”
“What. Milo, what—”
“Call the police.”
I got to it and looked in.
And then I understood exactly why he’d said it.
PART 2 — THE TOP PHOTOGRAPH
Sitting face-up on top, filling the whole inside of the lid, was a photograph of my son.
Taken from behind and from a distance. Milo at the bus stop on the corner of Bellamy and Court, backpack on, one shoe untied. Winter coat, so it was months old. He had no idea it was being taken. You could tell from the framing that whoever took it was somewhere elevated and far away.
There were more underneath. A stack of them, three inches thick, held together with a rubber band that had gone brittle.
Under the photographs was a brown envelope, and under that was a second envelope, thicker, and I could see the edge of a bill through a tear in the corner.
I did what I think most parents would do, which is that I closed the lid, took my child by the arm, walked him into the house, locked the door, and called 911 with my hands shaking so badly I had to try the last digit twice.
Officer Kell got there in eleven minutes.
I want to say plainly that she was excellent. She did not tell me to calm down. She looked at the photograph on top for about three seconds, said, “Okay,” and got on her radio, and then she asked me to keep Milo inside and away from the window.
Those were the worst ninety minutes of my life. I’ll take the fifty lunchboxes and the dress and all of it, and I will still tell you that the ninety minutes I spent sitting on the floor of my own hallway with my son’s head against my shoulder, thinking about someone photographing him from a distance for months, was the worst time I have ever had.
Dean came home from his shift at 8:15 and stood in the kitchen with his hands on top of his head, saying the same four words over and over.
At about eight o’clock, Officer Kell knocked and came in and sat down at my kitchen table and asked me if she could show me some things.
She had the photographs in an evidence sleeve.
“I need you to look at these,” she said, “and I want to tell you before you do that we’ve already identified who left them, and I want to tell you that our assessment right now is that this is not what it looks like.”
Then she laid them out.
There were, I found out later, three hundred and forty-one photographs in that lunchbox.
Almost all of them were Milo and Birdie.
Milo sitting on the curb next to her stroller with a drawing pad. Milo holding a fistful of dandelions with the dirt hanging off. Milo with a plastic mixing bowl on his head and Birdie in Rhonda’s arms with her whole face open, mid-shriek. Milo walking backwards up the sidewalk making a face. Milo in a rain poncho holding an umbrella over a stroller in October.
Two years of it. Dated on the back in pencil, in shaky block capitals.
Every single one taken from the same angle, from up high, at a distance of maybe sixty yards.
The second-floor window of the corner house at the end of Bellamy Row.
Officer Kell said, “Do you know the man who lives at 1174?”
I said I didn’t, and that is a sentence I have had to live with.
I had lived on that street six years. I knew that an old man lived in the corner house. I knew he had a lawn service and a grocery delivery and a wheelchair ramp that had gone up two winters ago. I knew he had not been at a block party in the entire time I had been there.
I did not know his name.
“Wendell Pike,” Officer Kell said. “He’s eighty-one. Two officers are with him now. He answered the door and told them straight out what he did before they asked him a single question.”
She turned over the top photograph — the one of Milo at the bus stop, the one that had made my son’s face go white.
There was writing on the back in the same shaky block capitals.
THIS IS THE ONE WHO DID IT.
PART 3 — 1962
Wendell Pike had lived in the corner house for thirty-one years.
He had worked at the Corwin foundry from 1962 until it closed in 1998, and the lunchbox on my lawn was the one he had carried there for thirty-six years, which is why it was dented down one side and why the paint was gone.
He had emphysema and congestive heart failure and had been told, that spring, that he was somewhere in his last year. He had no children. His wife had died in 2009.
He had not been able to get down his own front steps without help since the previous January.
So he sat in a chair in his second-floor front room, with an old camera on a tripod and a long lens he’d bought at an estate sale in the nineties, and he photographed Bellamy Row.
Not people’s windows. Not anybody’s back yard. The street. The sidewalk. The bus stop on the corner. The mail truck. The Petrosyans’ dog. Four hundred rolls’ worth of an ordinary street over two years, because he could not walk out into it.
He had thousands of photographs. He kept them in shoeboxes by month.
And out of all of them he had pulled three hundred and forty-one and put them in his own lunchbox, along with every dollar he had left in a savings account — eighteen thousand four hundred — and set it in the middle of my lawn at some time after two in the morning, using a walker, which took him, by his own account, more than an hour.
The fifty other lunchboxes were the street.
