“No, that’s Poweshiek.” Sarah Jane nodded. “Pottawattamie’s way over western Iowa. Almost Nebraska.”
“Right, sure. Well—I was wondering if I could have a look at your outbuilding,” said Sarah Jane, releasing Lisa’s hand and gesturing across the driveway; she didn’t see any point in putting it off. On the drive over she’d practiced a few reasons, and now she made her choice. “My dad wants to build himself a toolshed before summer.” Her father had been dead for several years. It was a gamble.
Lisa came out through the screen door. Her feet were bare; there was some dirt underneath her toenails, enough to see it without needing a closer look. She looked to be in her early thirties, but her manner seemed older: she walked languidly, and spoke slowly, her voice deeper than the one Sarah Jane might have imagined coming from that young face.
“Sure—it’s not much,” she said, starting down the porch toward the building in question and beckoning Sarah Jane to follow her. “It was already on the property when I got here. I think it might be original with the house.”
Inside the shed, its single overhead lightbulb too bright for the small space, Sarah Jane focused hard on her breathing, pretending to look into the corners she hadn’t already seen on the tape. She paced the perimeter slowly, looking up to the ceiling and trying to think of questions. She hadn’t thought far enough ahead.
“They don’t make ’em like this anymore,” she said after a while, pleased with herself.
“I guess not,” said Lisa Sample. “Mainly people buy them premade now. No real reason to build one, I guess.”
Sarah Jane thought very briefly about her life, about how little ever happened, and then she retrieved the printout of the paused frame from her purse. She didn’t really believe she was about to show it to a total stranger, but she didn’t see any other way to go about it.
“Listen,” she said. “I saw a strange movie and I recognized the places in it from having grown up out this way. Look over here”—she jabbed at the right side of the page—“that’s your house, right?”
Lisa leaned in to get a better look, then looked over at Sarah Jane. “I guess,” she said. “Looks more or less like it. Pretty blurry.”
“But this”—pointing now at the woman in the picture, her eyes a flash of panic in the grid—“this isn’t you?”
Lisa laughed. “No, no,” she said. She kept her eyes on the printout. “This must be from sometime before I got here.”
The dot matrix wasn’t great: if you didn’t know what you were supposed to be looking at, you might have had trouble defining the features of the person pictured, the face in the grain. But Sarah Jane had watched the sequence several times, concentrating hard. She’d traced the contours with her eyes and she knew what she was seeing now. She was sure of it.
They stood together there, in the place Sarah Jane knew beyond question was the set of the spliced-in scenes from the tapes, and nobody said anything for a minute.
“Huh,” said Sarah Jane. “Well, I’m sorry to bother you.”
“It’s no bother,” Lisa Sample said, reaching for the light switch as she headed back out toward the yard. “Can I get you a cup of coffee? There’s coffee inside.”