“I guess maybe,” said Sarah Jane, and she ejected the tape and put it back into its sleeve and headed back to the break room.
“We could just return it as defective,” Jeremy said after her.
“Or that,” she said over her shoulder, though in point of fact she neither called the police nor returned the tape to Northern Video, her distributor, for a replacement. Phone records and computer logs obtained from the Nevada Police Department show no calls or e-mails from Jeremy Heldt, Stephanie Parsons, or Sarah Jane Shepherd during this period. The Ames Police Department’s records document several phone calls from Collins years later, of course, but by then new people were involved—strangers; variables from the cloudy distant future. The one thing you can never plan for, Mom used to say. Unexpected guests.
6
She wanted to throw it into the trash; she felt sick. It was disturbing to think that just last month, this thing had been sitting on her coffee table at home for several days, like a snake in a houseplant. It was hard to know where to start asking questions—who, what, why, where: the zeros in the timecode represented a whole separate set of when questions, off in their own universe of uncertainty. She looked the tape up in the system, thinking maybe she’d contact the distributor: This is Sarah Jane Shepherd at Video Hut in Nevada. I think one of your suppliers …
No. This is Sarah Jane Shepherd at Video Hut in Nevada. Something’s wrong with …
No. Hi, I got a tape from you that’s had something else taped onto it and I think you should know about it. Maybe. Transfer the responsibility. But they, in turn, bought their tapes from somebody else, and that’s what they’d probably say: Everything arrives at the Northern Video warehouse sealed. All we do is pick and pack. This is probably one of your customers.
This is probably one of your customers. Video Hut did decent business, but was small. People who worked in Ames rented from Hollywood Video now. The customer base was shrinking. Stores like Sarah Jane’s were on their way out: they’d served small towns since the dawn of the VCR boom, but they couldn’t compete with volume. Count up the membership cards in the box on the counter by the computer terminal, throw out the ones that belonged to people who hadn’t rented in over a year, and you’d know exactly how big the pool of possible suspects was.
So she took She’s All That home with her that night, along with Targets—Jeremy’d called it “the other one, the old one”—and, from the comfort and safety of her recliner, fast-forwarded to the hard parts. Just like Stephanie Parsons, she took notes; but her own notes were very direct, item-by-item accounts of anything visible in the frame during the scenes in question, with no guesses or question marks. After running the She’s All That scene twice, she reviewed her work while the movie played on. Working efficiently while a movie played was second nature to her by now, more comfortable than silence.
She was making a check mark by a line that said “cheap card-table chair, something from a garage sale” when the end credits started. “Kiss Me” jangled along underneath while they rolled, warm and sentimental. Then, about halfway through, the song stopped, and the credits cut out, and the living room filled with light.
*
She left for Collins early the next morning, meaning to verify her suspicions and be back in time to open the store. She’d taken several Polaroids of the image on the screen during the end credits’ most harrowing moment; a snapshot of a paused screen wasn’t much, but you could still see the face clearly enough, the spatter drooling down its chin onto the dirt of the driveway. You could see the field off to the right. And you could see, finally, in the background, behind the woman apparently crawling away from it and toward the road, the unmistakable outline of a farmhouse; and you’d know, if you’d grown up anywhere nearby, exactly which house it was.
A woman in a faded floral-print dress, yellow daisies and blue cornflowers, answered the door. “Good morning,” she said. “What can I do for you?”
Sarah Jane looked at her, trying not to stare too hard. “Sarah Jane Shepherd,” she said; manners still came first. “My folks owned a farmhouse a little closer to town when I was a kid. I grew up over there.”
“Well, good to meet you, Sarah Jane Shepherd,” said the woman in the floral-print dress. “I’m Lisa. I came here about five years ago, I guess. I was up in Charles City before.”
“Lisa—”
“Sample.” She regarded Sarah Jane and extended her hand. “My folks were from Pottawattamie County.”
“Near Grinnell?”