I sat in the blue light of the screen in my quiet house and thought, very clearly, the way you think at one in the morning: This was not a mistake.
You could mix up a date. You could grab the wrong file. But you couldn't mix up a date and also send four notices that never arrived and also hold a hearing nobody was told about. One error is an accident. A pattern is a decision.
I thought about the Abernathys' old house, whose roofline was in the background of the picture. The Abernathys had been a young couple with a toddler, and in the fall of 2024 they had moved away rather suddenly. Their house had sat empty for a while, and then a property-management sign had gone up in the front yard, and now it was a rental with a rotating cast of tenants.
I hadn't thought anything of it at the time. People move.
I opened a new spreadsheet and typed, in the first cell, Who else?
* * *
Gus Delgado had three.
He brought them to the pin oak the next Tuesday folded in quarters in the breast pocket of his flannel shirt, even though it was already eighty degrees at seven in the morning. He didn't say anything; he just handed them to me along with my coffee.
The first, from April, was for "unapproved accessory structure" — the garden shed behind his house, which Imelda had picked out from a Menards catalog in 2009, and which the then-board had approved in writing, a letter Gus still had in a folder in his basement. The second was for "deteriorated garage door," and the third was a Notice of Fine: $2,350.
"I paid the first one," Gus said. "Two hundred bucks. Easier than fighting. Then I got the second one and I thought, okay, fine, I'll paint the door. I painted the door. Then I got this." He flicked the third letter with a thick fingernail. "Says I didn't cure. I cured. I cured like a ham."
The photo on the garage-door notice, dated as observed on June 6, showed Gus's garage door with a long scrape of bare primer along the bottom panel. And in the corner of his front yard, against the property line, was the Feeneys' little redbud — not my tagged redbud, a younger one — and it was blooming. A froth of magenta-pink along every bare branch.