Skeet Fisk came by the following Saturday. He stood on my porch, under the empty rectangle where my doorbell used to be, with his ball cap in his hands. Debra had paid him three hundred dollars cash, he said. She'd told him the board had voted, which was true, and that the cameras were coming down either way, which was not, and she'd told him about the bath, and he'd believed her because, he said, "Why would a lady say a thing like that if it wasn't so?" He said he had a daughter. He said he'd thought he was doing a decent thing. The police had cited him for malicious injury to property and the prosecutor was going to let him pay restitution and take a class. He had a box under his arm. It was a new doorbell camera, the exact model, and a new bullet camera, and he said the other one was on backorder but he'd bring it when it came and he'd put them all up himself if I'd let him.
I let him. He did good work. When he got to the north side of the garage he called down to me from the ladder and asked where I wanted it aimed. I told him to call Maisie.
Maisie came over on her week with her laptop and stood in the gravel in the side yard and talked him through it on speakerphone, even though he was eight feet above her, because she said it was easier to give directions to somebody who couldn't see your face. "Down," she told him. "Down more. Okay, stop. Left a hair. No, my left." When it was done she checked the frame against her saved file from April and said it was within half a degree, and she exported the settings again, and saved them in her folder called CAMERA STUFF, and then she made a second folder, and named it EVIDENCE, and copied everything into that too. I didn't ask why. I didn't need to.
The board held an emergency meeting the second week of August. Seventy-one people came. Some of them stood outside in the heat and listened through the open door. Norm Brubaker, now acting president, read a short statement written by the HOA's lawyer that said Mrs. Pelletier had resigned from the board, that the July camera amendment was rescinded effective immediately, that all fines associated with it were void, and that the clubhouse filing cabinet had been turned over to law enforcement. He did not say anything about baths. He did not have to. Kayleigh Mott, still taking the minutes, cried a little in the middle of it and nobody said anything about that either.
Then Norm folded up the statement and looked out at all of us and said, without the lawyer's help, "I abstained. In July. I want everyone to know I abstained, and I want everyone to know that abstaining was a coward's vote. I should've voted no. I knew it was wrong and I didn't want to be the one to say so out loud to her face." He looked at me. "Leland, I'm sorry."
A few people clapped. A few people looked at their shoes. The man from the newer street near the entrance, the one who'd asked what I needed four cameras for, did not come. I saw him in the grocery store a week later and he turned his cart around. Some people would rather keep the wrong survey than pay for a new one.
Three different neighbors came to me in the weeks that followed and asked if I'd look at my footage for them, specific dates, to see if Debra had been on their porch. I did it every time. I didn't charge. One of them was the Ochoas, and there she was, July second, 2:07 in the afternoon, bending at the edge of my doorbell's frame on their front walk, a white box going into the canvas tote. Mrs. Ochoa watched it with her hand over her mouth and said, "She brought us a ham. When my mother died, she brought us a ham."
I've left one thing out, and I've left it out on purpose, because I still don't know what to do with it.