On my way to Adam’s house, I stopped at the lumber yard in Maynard. Mike, who wears shorts year round and treats new customers like a border guard watching for terrorists, runs the place. As I paid for my studs, I noticed his security camera set-up. Bright, color photos of the snow in his lumber yard, blue tarps covering piles of wood, and me in my recently bought $1.99 red and black K-Mart flannel shirt flashed on four monitors.

“Is there anything you can’t see?” I asked.

“Nothing, and I can back up, play back and burn it all to a CD.”

“You catch people at night? Surely, your daytime customers aren’t stealing from you.”

“You’d be surprised. Sometimes I think it’s forgetfulness. I watched Fred Meyers load oak, then plywood and trim stock, but when he came in for the tally, he didn’t mention the oak. I said, ‘Fred, how about the oak?’ and he said, ‘What oak?’ These cameras cost me forty thousand and they switch to infrared when the sun goes down.

“But no thieves yet?”

“The best one so far is Harold’s dog. I caught him peeing in the back room by the door. I said, ‘Harold, why’d your dog pee on my floor?’ He said, ‘My dog is house broken, he’d never ever pee on your floor.’ I said he did. He said he didn’t, and then he called his wife Mildred. ‘Mike says Fritz peed on his floor.’ I could hear ‘em talking. ‘If Fritz is peeing on floors he’ll pee in the Barton’s house when we go there on vacation.’ Mildred says, “Fritz is house broken. He’d never ever do that. So Harold turns to me and says, ‘Millie says it wasn’t Fritz.’

I said forty thousand bucks says it was. I run the tape back and there’s his black dog out back. First he sniffs the caulk, then he sniffs the gate latches and then he sniffs the floor right before he squats downs and lets go. Harold calls Mille back to tell her what he just watched. Millie says, “Some other dog must have marked the floor first.”