In light of a criminal investigation involving illegal narcotics on your Lot, the Board of Directors has voted to levy a fine of $500.00 under Article VII, Section 12 (Nuisance), and to suspend your access to the Common Area amenities, including the pool and clubhouse, effective immediately and pending the outcome of said investigation.
I put it in the binder under its own tab. I wrote the date and time of delivery on a sticky note and stuck it on the front. I didn't cry until I'd finished, which I count as a professional achievement.
* * *
Gus came over at sunset on Sunday. He knocked on the back gate instead of the front door. I understood later that he didn't want Darlene's camera to watch him walk up my front path, and didn't care at all if it watched him in my backyard, where he could turn his back on it. He had his laptop under his arm, the old kind, thick as a dictionary, and the expression of a man who has found something in a culvert.
"I didn't look at the fox camera yesterday," he said. "I meant to. Always look at it Saturday morning with my coffee. But then the police were here and I got to watching all that, and then my daughter called from Spokane, and then I just plain forgot. Looked at it this morning." He set the laptop on my patio table and opened it. "You're going to want to sit down."
The trail camera took a burst of photos whenever its sensor tripped, then a short video clip, and stamped everything with the date, the time, the temperature, and the phase of the moon. Gus had already sorted the files. He clicked on the first one.
09/26 5:44:08 AM 52°F. A grey night-vision image of our street, of the gutter running down past Gus's hedge and across toward my side, of my mailbox and its clump of lavender. A small, bright-eyed fox was frozen mid-stride in the foreground, ears up, looking back over its shoulder up the hill.
"He saw her first," Gus said. "Look where he's looking."
He clicked forward. 5:44:11. The fox was gone. At the top of the frame, coming down the sidewalk from the direction of the Fisk house, was a woman in a quilted vest with a small, pale, fluffy dog on a leash. The infrared made her makeup look like a mask and Duchess look like a dandelion gone to seed.
5:44:40. The woman was at my mailbox. She was looking up the street, and then down it, and then directly at my house, and then, for one frame, almost straight into Gus's hedge, though she clearly didn't see the camera in it. Her face, in that frame, was perfectly clear.
Then Gus played the video clip, the twenty seconds the camera had taken when the motion sensor tripped. Darlene Fisk crouched beside my mailbox post. Duchess sat. Darlene reached into the left pocket of her vest, took out something small and dark, and pushed it down into the base of the lavender, at the back, where it would be hidden from the house but easy to find if you knew where to look. Then she straightened up, took a poop-bag dispenser off the leash handle, pulled out a bag, bent down again, and made an elaborate pantomime of picking something up off the grass beside the post. Duchess, who had not done anything, watched her with obvious confusion.
Darlene tied the empty bag in a knot, looked around once more, and walked back up the hill.