I put the lid back on the red. I set the brush down across the top of the can. It took me a minute.
She was right, of course. She usually is. It took about thirty-six hours for it to get big on its own.
The first thing was Soledad. On Tuesday afternoon, with Archie home and asleep on the couch with a new two-pack of pens in a pouch clipped to the cushion beside him, she posted in the Meadowlark Commons neighborhood group, the one the board didn't control, the one where people usually argue about fireworks and lost cats. She posted Yoshiko's footage, with Yoshiko's permission, all six minutes and forty seconds of it, uncut. Under it she wrote four sentences. This is my son. He is alive because Clem Benedetti saved his life and did not give up when an adult tried to stop her. The "unidentified substance" was epinephrine, which is printed on the label, which the adult read aloud. I would like that email retracted and an apology sent to the Benedetti family by the same distribution list.
By Wednesday morning the post had two hundred and eleven comments. By Wednesday night somebody had clipped the part where Bergstrom holds up the pen and says "you've been holding his second one in your purse," and it had left the neighborhood, the way things do now, and gone out into the wider world, where people who had never heard of Meadowlark Commons or Olathe, Kansas, watched a paramedic in a helmet hold an orange-tipped auto-injector up to the sun while a woman in a Flamingo visor stood frozen in a gate behind her. Clem read some of the comments and then stopped. "They're mean," she said. "About her. It's weird. I thought I'd like it."
The second thing was Wynette Dancy, who came to my door on Wednesday evening in her cardigan with a manila folder held against her chest.
"I'm not supposed to have this," she said. "Well. That's not true. As treasurer I'm entitled to every contract the Association signs. I just never looked before." She opened the folder on my kitchen table. Inside was a work order from the gate company, dated June 19, requesting disconnection of the emergency siren-activated override at the main entrance, signed by Verlene as Association president. Below it was a second work order from August 22, changing the visitor and emergency access code. Below that was a printout of the email to the board. Will handle notifying the relevant parties after Labor Day. "She didn't put either of these to a vote," Wynette said. "She's allowed to authorize repairs under a certain dollar amount without the board. She called them repairs."
"Have you shown anybody?"
"I emailed copies to the fire marshal's office this afternoon." She closed the folder. "And to the other three board members. And to our attorney. And I've called a special meeting of the membership for next Thursday under Section 4.6 of the bylaws, which lets twenty percent of the homeowners petition to remove a director. I have the signatures. I had them by noon." She looked at me over her glasses on their beaded chain. "I told you she wasn't a cruel woman, Ike. I still believe it. But I've watched that footage nine times. And there's a point, about four minutes in, where the officer asks her for the bag and she steps backward into the gate. And she looks at the boy. She looks right at him. And she holds on." Wynette took off her glasses. "I don't know what that is. I just know I'm not going to sit at a table with it anymore."
The fire marshal's office cited the Association on Friday for disabling a required emergency access device without notifying the fire code official and for failing to provide current gate access to emergency services. The fine was not large. The Association's insurer was less relaxed, and asked for every board decision Verlene had made unilaterally in the past three years. There were forty-one.