Not stopped like the camera died. Stopped like there was a gap. The clip ended at 11:16 and the next one started at 12:31, and Folasade's car was pulling into her driveway, and that was all.
"Your camera skips?" she said.
I didn't know. I'd never seen it skip before. Maisie was at her mom's, so I called her, and she had me read her some numbers off a screen she'd made me bookmark, and after a few minutes she said, "Dad, it rebooted. Somebody unplugged it or the power cut out. It's on the same circuit as the garage door opener, right? Did your breaker trip?"
It hadn't. The breaker was fine. The doorbell camera had kept running through the whole gap, and when I pulled it up, at 11:31 it showed a woman's shape moving along the very edge of the frame, across my lawn, past the corner of my garage, toward the outdoor outlet on the front of the house where the driveway camera was plugged in through a weatherproof box. You couldn't see her face. You could see a canvas tote bag. You could see the hem of a pair of lilac capri pants.
Folasade looked at the screen for a long time. Then she looked at me. Then she said, very quietly, "Leland, a lot of women own capri pants," and I said, "That's true," and she said, "I'm going to go home now," and she did.
That night, I posted in the Tamarack Ridge residents' Facebook group. I have thought about that post more than almost anything I've done in my adult life. I didn't name anybody. I didn't post the footage. I just wrote that a package had gone missing on Towhee Court and that I had cameras covering part of the street, and that if anyone else had lost a delivery in the last month or so I'd be happy to go through my footage for them, no charge, just knock. I added that I'd be going back through everything I had over the weekend, carefully, to see if there was a pattern. I thought I was being a good neighbor. I thought I was being, honestly, a little bit of a hero.
The post got nineteen likes and six comments, all from people saying thank you, and one from Norm Brubaker, the board treasurer, saying that this was exactly the kind of community spirit Tamarack Ridge was built on.
Debra didn't comment. Three days later, a letter came from the board.
It came in a long white envelope with the Tamarack Ridge logo printed in the corner, a little green tree that the developer's graphic designer had clearly never seen in person. Inside were two sheets. The first was a notice that the board would be considering an emergency amendment to the community rules at its regular meeting on Tuesday, July 22, at seven o'clock in the clubhouse. The proposed amendment was attached. It said that no residential security camera could be mounted at a height or angle that permitted it to capture "any portion of an adjacent lot, structure or window," that all existing cameras would need to be inspected and approved by the Architectural Review Committee within ten days, and that any camera found in violation would have to be removed, along with "all associated recording equipment and stored media," which would be "surrendered to the board for secure disposal."