Guilty by Proximity

Chapter 3— Timestamps

Hazel dropped the camera off at the station the next afternoon, handed it across the counter to a deputy she didn't recognize, someone young enough that this was probably still a novelty to him. He logged it into evidence like it was any other object—bagged it, tagged it, wrote a case number on a sticker in handwriting that slanted the wrong way—and not, as far as Hazel could tell, the last thing that had been strapped to her body while she watched a man's life end in front of her. It felt wrong to watch him handle it so casually. She wanted to tell him to be careful with it, though she couldn't have said what she thought might happen to it that hadn't already happened.

Dana wasn't at the desk. A note taped to the counter said she'd gotten pulled into something out at the county line and would call later. Hazel stood there a second longer than she needed to, wondering whether that was true, or whether her aunt was simply avoiding the conversation they both knew was coming.

Hazel didn't wait around to find out.

* * *

Milo was doing homework at the kitchen table when she got home, and Ethan was on the phone in the other room, his voice low and even in the particular register he used when he was trying not to sound as worried as he was.

"You gave them the camera?" he asked, once he'd hung up, leaning in the doorway.

"This afternoon."

"Good." He studied her for a moment, the way he'd been studying her for two days now, like he expected the shape of her grief to change if he looked hard enough. "You eat anything?"

"I will."

He let it go, the way he always did, and disappeared toward the kitchen to make sure that actually happened. Milo didn't look up from his textbook, but he didn't miss anything either.

"You've got the face," he said.

"What face."

"The one where you're somewhere else." He turned a page he clearly hadn't read. "You don't have to tell me. Just, you know. Don't disappear into your room and forget dinner exists."

"Noted."

* * *

She'd backed up every photo from the last three months onto her laptop out of habit, the way she backed up everything, so by the time she got upstairs she already had a full set sitting in a folder labeled MILL_DEMO, untouched since the night before. She sat in front of it for a long moment without opening it.

Some part of her understood that once she looked, she couldn't unlook. There was a version of tonight where she just let the police handle it and went to bed and let herself be seventeen for one more evening. She thought about that version for exactly as long as it took to reject it.

She opened it anyway.

The first dozen shots were nothing. Wide establishing frames of the mill's silhouette against the sky, a few close-ups of the rusted loading dock signage, one accidental shot of her own boot when she'd tripped over a root. Ordinary. Boring, even, in the specific way that made her chest ache now, because boring meant before, and there was no more before left in any of this.

She made herself go through them methodically, the way she would for any other piece—laying the frames out in order, checking each one against her memory of the night, building the sequence back up shot by shot instead of just scrolling blindly. It gave her hands something to do. It gave the part of her brain that wanted to fall apart something else to focus on instead.

Then the timestamps started to matter.

She pulled up the metadata panel, the little strip of information under each photo that most people never bothered to look at, and checked first, out of habit, that her camera's internal clock actually matched real time—she'd caught it drifting before, once, after a battery change, and the last thing she needed was to build an entire theory on a setting that was a few minutes off. It wasn't. She checked twice to be sure.

Then she started working backward from the last frame she remembered taking—the wide shot of the loading dock, 10:47 p.m. She scrolled earlier. 10:41. 10:33. 10:20, when she'd first arrived and started setting up. Each frame logged a few minutes apart, consistent, exactly the rhythm she remembered from that night, nothing skipped or out of order.

And then, cross-referencing against the timeline the officer had read back to her the night before, the numbers did something she hadn't expected.

Liam had told the officer he'd arrived at the mill sometime around 10:50, gave a rough estimate because he hadn't exactly been checking his watch while he was finding a body. The coroner's early estimate—unofficial, the kind of thing that leaked out in a small town whether it was supposed to or not, put the time of death somewhere between 10:15 and 10:40.

Hazel's last photo before she found him was 10:47.

She ran the math twice, like it might change the second time. If that held up, Liam physically could not have done it. He would have arrived after Holloway was already gone.

She sat back from the laptop like the screen had shocked her.

It should have felt like relief. It mostly felt like vertigo—the sudden, dizzying sense of standing somewhere she hadn't meant to stand, holding something she hadn't meant to hold. She wanted to hate him. She'd spent years practicing it, or something close enough to it that it didn't matter what you called it, and now here she was with proof sitting right there on her screen that the whole town, and half her own gut instinct, had gotten it wrong. It didn't make her like him. It just made the hating feel suddenly, uncomfortably unearned.

She should call Dana. She should call Dana right now.

Instead, because she was who she was, because some stubborn reflexive part of her brain refused to let anything go until she'd picked it apart from every angle first, Hazel kept scrolling. Earlier. Further back. The shots from when she'd first arrived, before she'd even fully set up, testing angles, testing light.

That was when she saw it.

A frame from 10:22, one of the throwaway ones, a wide shot of the tree line she'd taken almost by accident while adjusting her aperture. At first it looked like nothing—a smudge in the far left edge of the frame, the kind of thing she'd normally dismiss as a branch, a trick of shadow. She almost scrolled past it.

Something made her stop.

She zoomed in. The image dissolved into pixels almost immediately, the resolution nowhere near good enough to do what she needed it to do. She zoomed out, then in again, slower this time, and the shape resolved just enough to stop being a shadow. Even blurred, even fractured into a mess of gray and black, it was unmistakably a person. Standing at the edge of the tree line. Facing the mill.

At 10:22. Well inside the coroner's window.

Hazel's stomach turned over slowly, the way it did on the drop of a rollercoaster, that sick lag between your body understanding something and your brain catching up.

Someone else had been there. Someone who wasn't Liam, who wasn't her, who had been standing in the trees at almost exactly the time Mr. Holloway was killed, close enough to have seen something, or done something, and gone before either of them ever arrived.

She sat with that for a long moment, the cursor still hovering over the zoomed image, her own reflection faint and ghostly in the dark parts of her laptop screen.

Then she remembered something else.

Something the officer had mentioned last night, almost in passing, the kind of detail that hadn't seemed important until right now: Holloway's phone. They'd recovered it near the body. She replayed the conversation in her head, piece by piece, trying to reconstruct exactly what he'd said while he filled out his report, distracted, tired, talking more to himself than to her. The last outgoing text, sent at 10:19, three minutes before the blurred figure appeared in her photo.

Hazel didn't have access to phone records. She wasn't supposed to have access to phone records. But she did have one thing the officer had let slip without meaning to: the last four digits of the number Holloway had texted.

She hadn't written the whole number down. She hadn't needed to.

She sat there staring at her screen, at the blurred shape at the tree line, at the four digits scrawled in her own handwriting on the notepad beside her laptop, and felt the whole night rearrange itself around one simple, impossible fact.

She knew that number. She'd known it her whole life.