"Through the end of September," Lamont said, "that load accounts for approximately sixty-five thousand kilowatt-hours. At our rate, plus the additional demand charges, it has cost this Association a little over nine thousand, eight hundred dollars." He looked up at the room. "It does not originate from Ms. Sundquist's house. It cannot. It originates from this meter. Our meter. Which serves only this clubhouse, the pool, the pavilion, and the pump house."
That was when Glenda went pale.
I've heard people say that about someone and always figured it was a figure of speech. It isn't. I watched the color leave her face in about two seconds, starting at her forehead and going down, until she looked like someone had pulled her own breaker. Her lips went gray. Her hand, on the table, closed around a pen so hard her knuckles stood up.
She had known about the slab. I'm sure she had. But I don't think until that moment she had seen it laid out in front of her, flat and enormous and unarguable, starting on the exact afternoon her son moved home and never stopping since.
"I," she said. And then she stopped, and didn't say anything else.
"Madam President," Lamont said, very gently, "I'd like to move that the Board inspect the pump house. Tonight."
X.
Glenda found her voice. It came out thin. "The pump house is a restricted area. There are chemicals. There's an insurance requirement that..."
"Ma'am," Arlette Nakamura said, standing, still friendly, but with the friendliness pushed to the back now, "I'm not asking as a resident. I'm an electrical inspector for the City of Calder Springs. Based on what I've just seen, I have reason to believe there's thirteen and a half kilowatts of unpermitted electrical load inside a small block building that also stores pool chemicals. Chlorine and muriatic acid. That's a fire hazard. I can request access as an inspector, or I can call the fire marshal, who lives four miles away and who I'm fairly sure will be here in fifteen minutes, with a much less cheerful attitude than mine."
It was Tamsin Whitlow who seconded Lamont's motion. She did it without looking at Glenda. She said, quietly, "Second," and wrote it in the minutes, and her bangles shook a little as she wrote. The vote was four to one.
The pool contractor kept a second key, it turned out, in a lockbox on the gate; one of the members-at-large had the code. And so at 7:51 p.m. on a Thursday night in late September, about forty residents of Bluebonnet Trace walked out the back door of the clubhouse, across the pool deck, and down the gravel service drive in the warm dark, and stood in a crowd in front of the pump house door, where the vent was roaring away as it had every night since March.