The clubhouse at Tamarack Ridge is a single-story building next to the pool with a kitchenette, a room full of folding chairs and a framed aerial photograph of the subdivision from 2011, back when half the lots were still dirt. On a normal meeting night maybe eight people came. On July 22 there were forty-three. I counted them, because that's what I do when I'm nervous. They had filled the chairs and were standing along the back wall under the photograph and a couple of the teenagers from the pool were sitting on the counter of the kitchenette eating Popsicles. Somebody had told people something. I didn't know what yet.
The board sat at a folding table at the front. Debra in the middle, in a navy cardigan despite the heat, her reading glasses on a beaded chain. Norm Brubaker, the treasurer, on her right, a retired insurance adjuster with a gray crew cut and a habit of tapping his pen on his teeth. On her left, the secretary, a young mother named Kayleigh Mott who took the minutes on a laptop and always looked like she'd rather be anywhere else. Two empty chairs. The board was supposed to have five members but nobody had run for the other two seats in years.
They did the regular business first. A bid for resealing the pool deck. A complaint about a boat trailer on Killdeer Way. Then Debra took her glasses off and let them drop against her chest and said, "Before we take up the emergency amendment, I have to say something personal, and I'm going to ask for everyone's patience, because this is very hard for me."
The room went still.
"Most of you know my husband is in care," she said. "Most of you know I live alone now." Her voice was steady, but her hands weren't. She had them flat on the table in front of her and I watched the fingers press down until the nails went white. "For several weeks I've had a feeling that I was being watched in my own home. I told myself I was being silly. I'm a woman alone, I'm sixty-three, these things happen to your nerves. But on Friday night, the eighteenth, at about twenty to ten, I was taking a bath." She stopped. She looked down. Somebody in the back said, "Oh, Debra," the way you'd say it at a funeral. "I was taking a bath," she said again, "and I looked up at my window, and I saw a light. A small red light, blinking. On the side of the house next door. Pointed at my bathroom."
Forty-three heads turned to look at me. I felt it like weather.
"I'm not going to say anything more about it than that," Debra said. "I'm not going to accuse anyone of anything. I don't need to. I just want to say that I have not been able to sleep in my own bed since. And I want this board to make sure that it never happens to anybody else in this community."
I stood up. I don't remember deciding to. I said, "Debra, my cameras don't have a red light."
"Mr. Dupuis," she said, without looking at me, "you'll have a chance to speak during public comment."