I called Tamsin. It was ten at night, and she picked up on the second ring, and I could hear a centrifuge whining somewhere in the background.
"Ms. Haskett," she said, after I'd told her. "Can I tell you something about your data?"
"Please."
"You have the longest unbroken photo series of any volunteer in central Ohio. Two hundred and forty-eight sessions. Seven points. Never missed a week in two and a half years except for the ice storm, and you made it up the next day. Do you know how rare that is? People quit. They quit after a summer. They quit when it gets cold." She paused. "Your buckeye is in a paper. A real one. We're submitting in November. You're in the acknowledgments."
I put my hand over my mouth.
"Your pictures are the reason that woman is in trouble," Tamsin said. "Not your opinions. Not Gus's opinions. The pictures. If you stop, the record stops. Don't let her stop the record."
So on Friday morning, at seven, I went out. Gus was waiting at the pin oak with two coffees. Ruth came too, in her enormous sun hat, though it was cloudy. And Priya, with Biscuit, and the boys, who had been told it was a science field trip and were wearing headlamps for no reason. We walked all seven points together, a little parade, and at the bus stop the young mother saw us coming — a widow, a retired machinist, an eighty-year-old woman in a hat, a lawyer, two little boys with headlamps, and a greyhound — and something in her face changed, and she looked down at her phone.
* * *
The lien was recorded with the Delaware County Recorder on September 12. The foreclosure complaint was filed in the Court of Common Pleas on September 26. Wren Hollow Homeowners Association v. Ruth A. Pruitt, et al. A process server came to Ruth's door on a Saturday morning and handed her a stack of paper an inch thick, and she stood on her front walk holding it in both hands while the man drove away, and she didn't move until I came out and got her.
Priya entered an appearance as Ruth's attorney that Monday. Pro bono. Her firm's managing partner, she told me, had said something about "community relations" and then, after he'd read the exhibits, had said, "Oh, hell, take it."
The answer and counterclaim she filed on October 7, a Tuesday, was forty-one pages long, with nineteen exhibits. It asserted that the fines were void for lack of notice and hearing, that the evidence supporting them was fabricated, and that the plaintiff's president had engaged in a pattern of fraudulent violation enforcement against elderly owners for the benefit of an entity controlled by her son-in-law. Exhibit 7 was a side-by-side of the Ruth photograph and my WH-1 frame from the same claimed date. Exhibit 8 was the excavator series. Exhibit 9 was a sworn affidavit from Dr. Tamsin Oyelaran, Ph.D., describing the Ohio Seasons Project's photo protocol and authenticating the server time stamps on my uploads. Exhibit 12 was the EXIF printout from Gus's email. Exhibit 14 was the Copperline property chain: Abernathy, Ellery, Bickel. Exhibit 16 was Hal Brenner's affidavit about the account.