CHAPTER 2: SHADOWS ON THE SCREEN
“Look at her!” Brenda’s voice swung like an uncalibrated pendulum, loud enough to make the air vibrate against the glass of neighboring cars. She turned her body toward the small crowd of onlookers, her bright coral blouse fluttering against her ribs in the humid breeze. “Look at the posture! No panic, no concern for anyone else waiting out here in forty-degree heat! She sits here like this lot belongs to her father!”
A man in a sun-faded baseball cap shifted his grocery sacks from one arm to the other, his forehead slick with sweat. Beside him, a young mother holding a crying toddler looked away, uncomfortable, but no one moved. The parking row had become a stage, and Brenda held the center of it with the practiced ease of an actor who knew the audience wouldn’t walk out during the middle of a scene.
Evelyn didn’t shift her feet. Her boots remained anchored to the cracked white paint of the parking line beneath her wagon. Her denim jacket felt heavy, the cotton lining damp against her shoulder blades, retaining the quiet heat of the pharmacy interior she had left only five minutes ago.
“I am asking you to back your vehicle out of the traffic lane, Brenda,” Evelyn said, keeping her tone measured, her vocal cords loose. “You are blocking three separate cars behind you.”
“Oh, don’t worry about the cars behind me!” Brenda tapped the screen of her phone with a manicured fingernail, a sharp clack-clack that sounded like small stones hitting a windowpane. “They understand what community means. They know how to wait their turn!”
Brenda spun back around, stepping closer until the metallic heat off the SUV’s hood radiated against the side of Evelyn’s face. She shoved her phone screen forward, inches from Evelyn’s nose. “Explain this, then! Go on, tell everyone standing right here that you just got out!”
On the glass screen, smudged with oily thumbprints and a tiny, pale ring from a condensation drop, was a photograph. It showed the rear quarter-panel of a silver hatchback parked in this exact spot, the angle low and sharp, captured from across the driving aisle. Beneath the image, the digital overlay displayed bold yellow numerals: 02:00 PM.
“I took that image myself when I pulled into the row,” Brenda declared, her voice rising in triumph as she turned the phone toward the man in the baseball cap. “Two o’clock on the dot! I’ve been circling because of people like her. Look at the car! Same silver, same position, same spot! She’s been sitting right here for over twenty minutes, playing games while mothers with toddlers are looking for parking!”
The man in the cap glanced at the screen, his mouth tightening into a thin line. He looked over at Evelyn, his eyes narrowing slightly under the brim of his hat. “Twenty minutes is a long time to hog a frontline space, miss,” he murmured, his voice laced with the quiet friction of an afternoon spent waiting in lines.
Evelyn looked at the photograph on the glass. The glare of the August sun washed out the details, but her eye caught the lower edge of the bumper. There was no tiny, silver-framed magnetic badge above the exhaust—the small, worn dealer emblem that had been on her wagon since she bought it secondhand three years ago. The shadow fell differently across the rear tire, too, flat and gray where her own tire tread was deep and caked with the dry red dirt from her gravel driveway.
She raised her eyes from the screen, meeting Brenda’s glare behind the gold-rimmed lenses. “That isn’t my car, Brenda.”
“It’s a silver wagon in spot 4B!” Brenda snapped, her chest heaving as she pulled the phone back toward her chest like a prize. “What, do you think everyone here is blind? You think a coat of dust hides the fact that you’ve been idling here since two?”
“My license plate frame has a crack on the lower right corner,” Evelyn said quietly, her voice cutting clean through the rising murmur of the small crowd. “Your thumb is covering the plate on that photo.”
Brenda’s jaw worked silently for a fraction of a second, her red lipstick gathering in the tiny lines around her upper lip. She tightened her grip on the device, her knuckles turning white against the pink plastic case. “You are unbelievable. Absolutely unbelievable! The sheer nerve of trying to lie your way out of a timestamp!”
She didn’t uncover the bottom of the photo. Instead, she swiped her screen aggressively, tapping her secondary phone with her thumb before lifting it back to her ear.
“Yes! Security? This is Brenda Lawson,” she barked into the receiver, her voice dropping into a tone of breathless, rehearsed urgency. “I need an officer at the pharmacy row immediately. I have an aggressive patron refusing to yield a spot, blocking traffic, and threatening other shoppers. She’s been squatting here for nearly half an hour and she’s getting hostile!”
Across the aisle, the young mother stepped back two paces, drawing her toddler behind her hip, her eyes wide as she looked from Brenda to Evelyn.
Evelyn didn’t reach for her pockets. She didn’t adjust her stance. She simply stood beside her trunk, feeling the faint, steady vibration of her wagon’s cooling fan ticking down beneath the hood, while behind her windshield, the tiny blue LED light on the dashcam continued its quiet, unblinking pulse.
