The morning fog hung low over Bittersweet Court, thick enough to taste. It muted the vibrant green of the lawns and turned the white picket fences into ghostly, floating ribs.
At 8:15 AM, the Cul-de-Sac Cold Case Club assembled on the sidewalk. To any observer watching from behind blinds or reviewing Ring footage, it looked like a wholesome suburban ritual: three mothers exercising their pets before the day’s heat set in.
Maya held the leash of Sarah Vance’s cavalier spaniel, Barnaby. Sarah had surrendered the dog at her front door ten minutes ago, her hands shaking so badly she couldn’t clasp the collar. She hadn’t spoken, just passed the leash through the crack in the door like a hostage exchange.
Elena stood next to Maya, managing her own golden retriever, Buster, who was happily sniffing a fire hydrant.
And Chloe walked slightly ahead, pushing an empty jogging stroller.
Inside the stroller, hidden beneath a muslin blanket printed with organic avocados, sat the Pelican case. A directional antenna poked out from the side, disguised as a child’s toy fishing rod.
“Signal is weak here,” Chloe murmured, adjusting her earbuds. She wasn’t listening to a podcast. She was listening to the hum of the frequency scanner. “Negative forty decibels. It’s background fuzz.”
“Keep walking,” Maya said, keeping her voice low and cheerful, the kind of tone used to discuss potty training or pilates. She smiled at a passing landscaping truck. “Head toward the empty house.”
They moved counter-clockwise around the circle. The air smelled of damp earth and the exhaust of the idling SUVs waiting for the school bus at the development entrance.
“Sarah looked bad,” Elena noted, checking her watch—a nervous tic she used to ground herself. “She’s not sleeping. If she cracks, Maya, she’s going to tell him everything.”
“She won’t crack,” Maya said, though she wasn’t sure. “She knows he’s listening. Fear is keeping her quiet for now.”
“Signal rising,” Chloe interrupted. She stopped the stroller abruptly, pretending to adjust the wheel. “Jumped to negative twenty. He’s close.”
They were standing in front of Number 5—the Thorne family’s old home, the Cursed House. It stood vacant and hollow, its windows dark. The “For Sale” sign was crooked, leaning drunkenly into a patch of overgrown hostas.
“Is it coming from the house?” Maya asked, tensing. She scanned the windows, half-expecting to see Elias Thorne’s wire-rimmed glasses glinting from the second floor.
Chloe swiveled the stroller left, then right. The antenna swept the air.
“No,” Chloe whispered. “When I point it at the house, it drops. It’s not inside.”
She turned the stroller toward the gap between Number 4 and Number 5—the narrow easement that led to the wetlands.
“It’s behind us,” Chloe said. “Toward the trees.”
Maya looked at the tree line. The federally protected wetlands—the Sinks—began exactly twenty feet past her property line. It was a wall of vegetation: tall reeds, twisting scrub oaks, and murky, standing water. It was the one part of The Gables that the HOA couldn’t manicure.
“The trail,” Maya said. “There’s a deer path that runs behind the properties. The kids use it to smoke weed.”
“Let’s go,” Elena said, tightening her grip on Buster’s leash.
They stepped off the pavement. The transition was jarring. One moment, their sneakers were on smooth, level asphalt; the next, they were sinking into soft, wet mulch. The temperature dropped five degrees as they entered the shade of the canopy.
The silence of the suburbs vanished, replaced by the organic noise of the marsh. Crickets. The plop of frogs. The rustle of wind in the dry reeds.
“Signal is screaming,” Chloe hissed. “Negative ten. We’re right on top of it.”
She pushed the stroller over a tree root. The plastic wheels clattered loudly.
“Quiet,” Maya snapped. She tied Barnaby’s leash to a sapling. “If he’s monitoring the audio live, he’ll hear us approaching.”
“He thinks we’re walking dogs,” Elena whispered. “Dogs make noise.”
“Dogs don’t push strollers through the woods,” Maya countered.
She moved past Chloe, taking the lead. Her eyes scanned the trees. She looked for anything unnatural. A glint of metal. A straight line in a world of curves.
The Sinks smelled distinct here—rotten eggs and sweet decay. It was the smell of standing water that never drained.
“Where is it?” Maya muttered.
“Three o’clock,” Chloe directed, pointing the toy fishing rod. “Strongest spike is right there. That oak tree.”
Maya looked at the tree. It was a massive, ancient oak, its roots gnarly and exposed like arthritic fingers. About seven feet up the trunk, a wooden birdhouse was strapped to the bark with a zip tie.
It looked innocent. Rustic. Just a bit of nature appreciation.
Except the hole for the bird was black and glassy.
Maya approached it slowly. She stepped carefully, avoiding dry twigs.
“It’s the birdhouse,” she whispered.
She circled the tree, approaching from the rear. The zip ties were heavy-duty black plastic. A thick cable ran from the back of the birdhouse, down the trunk, and disappeared into the mulch at the base of the tree.
Maya knelt and brushed away the leaves. Buried shallowly in the dirt was a waterproof Pelican case—smaller than Chloe’s, painted camouflage green.
“Found the receiver,” Maya said.
Chloe abandoned the stroller and crept over. She pulled the RF wand out and waved it over the birdhouse. The device shrieked.
“That’s it,” Chloe said. “That’s the relay. The bugs in your house transmit to this box. This box records it and probably bursts it to a cloud server via a cellular uplink.”
Maya stood up and looked at the front of the birdhouse.
It was angled perfectly. Through the gap in the trees, it had a direct line of sight to the back of her house. It looked straight into the sunroom. It looked into the nursery window.
“He’s been watching me from here,” Maya said, a wave of nausea rolling through her. “For months.”
“Don’t touch it,” Elena warned. “If you block the lens, he’ll know.”
“He already knows,” Maya said. “But look.”
She pointed to the lens. It was a fixed wide-angle. It wasn’t a PTZ (pan-tilt-zoom) camera. It was stationary.
“It has a field of view,” Maya analyzed. “Maybe a hundred and twenty degrees. It sees my house. It sees part of the yard.”
She stepped to the side, moving behind the trunk of a neighboring pine tree.
“Can the lens see me here?” she asked.
Chloe looked at the angle. “No. The oak tree blocks the view to the left.”
“And the signal?” Maya asked.
Chloe checked the meter. “The transmission is directional. The antenna inside is pointing at your house to catch the bugs. The signal leak behind the tree is minimal.”
Maya stepped further back into the woods. “He has a blind spot.”
She looked deeper into the Sinks. The wetlands stretched out for acres—a maze of water and tall grass.
“If we stay behind the tree line,” Maya said, her voice gaining strength, “we can move through the woods without him seeing us. We can access the back of every house on the cul-de-sac from here.”
Elena looked at the muddy water. “You want us to crawl through a swamp?”
“I want us to use the one path he isn’t watching,” Maya said. “He built a fortress of surveillance on the street side. He bugged the interiors. But he thinks the wetlands are his ally. He thinks no one goes back here.”
Maya looked at the birdhouse one last time. It was a violation, yes. But it was also a mistake. By placing it here, he had defined his boundaries.
“We leave it,” Maya decided.
“Leave it?” Chloe gasped. “Maya, it’s recording your house!”
“If we destroy it, he puts up another one, maybe one we don’t find,” Maya argued. “If we leave it, we know exactly what he sees. And more importantly, we know what he doesn’t see.”
She knelt and carefully covered the receiver box with mulch again, smoothing it to look undisturbed.
“We feed him what we want him to hear,” Maya plotted. “We play normal in the house. We stage the drama he wants. But the real investigation happens back here. In the blind spot.”
A twig snapped nearby.
All three women froze. The sound came from deeper in the woods, towards the water.
Barnaby, tied to the sapling, let out a low, vibrating growl. Buster’s ears swiveled forward.
“Did you hear that?” Elena whispered.
Maya stared into the dense reeds. The fog swirled, grey and impenetrable.
“Someone’s there,” Maya breathed.
It wasn’t the killer. The killer would be quiet. This was a clumsy sound. A foot dragging in mud.
“Hello?” Chloe called out, her voice trembling.
No answer. Just the rustle of the wind.
“Let’s go,” Maya said, untying Barnaby quickly. “Back to the street. Now.”
They retreated, moving fast. Chloe manhandled the stroller over the roots. They burst out of the tree line and back onto the pavement of Bittersweet Court like divers surfacing for air.
The sun was breaking through the mist now. The Gables looked normal again. A landscaping crew was blowing leaves three houses down.
But Maya looked back at the dark gap between the houses. The birdhouse was invisible from here, swallowed by the shade.
“He has a blind spot,” Maya repeated to herself, gripping the leash. “But he’s not the only one hiding in it.”
She looked at her shoes. They were caked in black mud.
“Clean your shoes before you go inside,” Maya ordered the others. “If he sees mud on the floor through the camera, he’ll know we went off-road.”
“Who was in the woods, Maya?” Elena asked, loading Buster into her car.
“I don’t know,” Maya said, looking at the empty house next door. “But I think it’s time we introduced ourselves to the neighbors we haven’t met yet.”
She looked down at Barnaby. The spaniel was trembling, pressing against her leg. He had smelled something in the Sinks. Something that smelled like fear.
“The receiver is found,” Maya said. “Now we find the source.”