Ozzie's phone recording was closer and shakier and had a soundtrack, mostly of Ozzie.
"What do you think you're doing? That's private property."
"This is an Association matter, Mr. Stanek. Please go back inside for your own safety."
"My own safety? Lady, I was at Khe Sanh."
"Then you'll understand the importance of following procedure."
I'll admit I laughed out loud at that, alone on my patio. Then I stopped laughing, because the recording kept going. The four men came out through the gate one at a time with my things on hand trucks, the freezer strapped down with its cord dragging, the mower driven up the ramp into the box truck by a kid who couldn't have been more than twenty and who was clearly enjoying himself. And then, at 10:31, the recording caught Glenda walking away from the crew, down the east side of my house, phone up, to the meter socket. She stood in front of it and took picture after picture. She leaned in close. She reached out and touched the seal, turning it in her fingers.
Then she did something I didn't expect. She turned and looked out past my house, across the street, toward the green pad-mount transformer on the property line, and then past it, down the road toward the amenity center, where you could just see the brown roof of the pump house beyond the pool fence. She looked that way for a long time. Long enough that Ozzie, on the recording, said, "What's she looking at?"
And then she put her phone away and walked back to her clipboard.
I watched that part four times. Something in the way she'd stood there bothered me, and I couldn't name it. It wasn't the look of a woman who'd caught somebody. It was the look of a woman doing arithmetic and not liking the answer.
V.
I didn't go over there. Glenda came to me.
It was the next morning, a little after eight. I was on the front porch with coffee, and the golf cart came around the corner of Larkspur Bend at its usual stately eleven miles an hour and stopped at the end of my driveway. Glenda got out. No visor this time. She had on a pressed denim shirt and reading glasses pushed up into her hair, and she was carrying a manila folder, and she walked up my driveway like a woman walking into a deposition she'd prepared for.