I lift one foot off the rung of the ladder, bracing it against the rising branch to my left to get a closer look at the box, blinking away a bead of sweat that runs into my eye. With the muscles of my arm starting to burn where I’m holding onto the tree, I shift my weight further across so I’m almost directly in front of the small circular aperture in the wood. Close enough to see what’s blocking the hole.
A cold, liquid sensation forms in my stomach as I see what it is.
Because it’s not an egg, or a piece of shell.
It’s the lens of a camera.
PART II
You learn to blend in, to hide in the crowd like a regular person. To satisfy your craving in other ways: to go where you want, to see someone’s true nature behind the artifice. To see how they live, knowing that you hold their life in the palm of your hand. But you never forget who you are.
You know that when the day comes, you can do what needs to be done.
10
“It was pointing directly at the house,” I say quietly. “Right at the drive and the front door.”
We’re sitting at the kitchen table nursing cups of tea, Jess opposite me. The bird box is opened up on the table between us, the equipment inside removed. It’s a gray rectangle about the size of a packet of cigarettes, the clear plastic hemisphere of a small camera connected to it by red-and-blue coiled wire. Another wire, dark brown—presumably to camouflage it against the bark—had led up and out of the box to the next branch above, where a palm-sized solar panel was attached in a position that made it invisible from the ground. It had taken me three-quarters of an hour to remove all of it from the oak tree, which made me wonder how long it had taken to put up in the first place.
Jess crosses her arms. “Makes my skin crawl just thinking about it. How long do you think it’s been there?”
“Hard to say.” I gesture with a screwdriver. “Although… you see these? The screws that were holding the bracket to the tree are still shiny, not corroded or discolored by the weather. So I don’t think it could have been there very long.”
Jess leans away as if the device might come to life and bite her.
“You’re sure you’ve disabled it?”
“I’ve isolated the battery. There’s no power going to it.”
The children are in the back garden, their excited voices reaching us through the open window as they play frisbee with the dog. We’ve told Daisy and Callum that the camera was for studying nesting birds inside the box—Leah silently agreeing to play along with the fiction so as not to alarm her younger siblings too much.
“I don’t understand,” Jess says. “What the hell is it even there for?”
I pick up the device and peer into the smooth glass eye of the camera lens as if it might hold the answers.
“I guess the last owner could have installed it,” I say. “Keep an eye on his house when he was away?”
“But… twenty-five feet up a tree?” She doesn’t look convinced. “In a nesting box? I thought half the point of having cameras was to make them obvious, so a burglar would know he was being filmed?”
This was new territory for us—we had never owned a house big enough to merit this kind of security.
“Maybe some are visible,” I say, “and some hidden. This was one they forgot to take down, or something?”
“But you just said it looked quite new.”
“I’m thinking aloud.”
“We should call the police anyway,” she says firmly. “Just in case.”
I shrug. “To say what? We found a camera left by the previous owner?”
She fixes me with one of her serious stares, the little line deepening between her eyebrows.
“And what if it was someone else?”
“Like who?”
“We should report it, at the very least. Get someone around to look at this thing.”
