The spare key was still there, exactly where I had left it, but the fake rock was sitting slightly crooked. I picked it up and checked the dirt underneath, and there were fresh marks around the edges that hadn’t been there when I left. I went inside and checked the front door, then the back door, then every window. Nothing looked disturbed until I noticed the curtains in the living room were open. I always close them before leaving, and the photograph in the Facebook post had been taken from the exact corner where the bookshelf blocks the view from outside.
I called my neighbor and asked whether anyone had been at my house while I was gone. She said no, but then she remembered seeing a dark SUV parked across the street that afternoon. She hadn’t thought anything of it because the storm had knocked out power in several houses and people were coming and going. I pulled up the original Facebook post again and zoomed in on the reflection in the window. There was a faint shape behind the camera, and it looked like someone standing in the hallway.
I reported the account to the group administrator and sent him the original photograph. He told me the woman who posted it had joined the group only three weeks earlier and had never commented before. Then he checked the upload information and called me back. The photo hadn’t been uploaded from my town. It had been posted from a device using a connection registered only a few streets from my house. I asked him if he could tell me when the account had been active, and he said there had been one other login that afternoon, less than ten minutes before the photograph appeared.
I drove back home that night and checked the spare key again. This time, I noticed a tiny strip of clear tape wrapped around the bottom edge of the fake rock. Under it was a second key, one I had never seen before. It opened the side door of my house. I stood there for several minutes before going inside, and when I finally switched on the hallway light, I saw something sitting on the floor beneath the bookshelf: a printed photograph of me leaving for Columbus that morning, taken from inside my own living room.
