My Cameras Caught My Own Family

Four days before, I came home to a house that had been touched

Four days before my birthday, I came home from a two-day job out in Dent County, wiring a new camera system for a hog operation, and I knew something was wrong before I even got my key in the door.

There is a certain feeling a house has when somebody has been inside it while you were gone. A shift in the stillness. A trace of another person where there is not supposed to be one. I have walked into hundreds of houses right after a break-in. I know that feeling in my chest the way a farmer knows weather in his knees.

I stood on my own porch and felt it. Then I went in slow, and I did not touch a thing.

In the kitchen, two glasses sat in the sink, rinsed but not washed. A ring on my counter where somebody had set a wet cup down with no coaster, which anybody who knows me knows I would never do. On the second shelf of my pantry, a box of the exact peppermint tea my sister drinks. I do not drink peppermint tea. I have never once bought it.

In the second bedroom, the quilt my grandmother made had been moved off the foot of the bed and left folded wrong on the chair. And when I leaned close to the pillow, I could smell Brenda’s perfume, that heavy vanilla drugstore one she has worn since high school. Not a faint trace from somebody passing through. It had settled into the pillowcase the way a scent only settles when a person has slept there more than one night.

Then I opened the cabinet over my refrigerator, the high one, where I keep the good bottle.

That was when I knew for sure.

I had one bottle of Weller Antique bourbon up there. My late husband, Dale, gave it to me the Christmas before he passed in 2016, and told me to save it for a day worth celebrating. Eight years I had left it unopened, waiting for the right day. The box was still there. The bottle was gone.

It was not about the whiskey. You could buy that bottle for forty dollars if you were lucky enough to find it. It was the empty space where it had been. It was the plain confidence of whoever had reached up, taken the one thing in that house they knew meant something to me, and walked out the door with it.

I did not call my parents. I did not call Brenda. I sat down at my own kitchen table, poured myself a glass of tap water, opened my laptop, and pulled up ninety-six hours of my own footage. Then I started watching.