I want to be clear about what I did next, because it matters to everything that came after. I did nothing official. I couldn't. I had no authority in Fernhill yet, not until I raised my right hand on the fifteenth, and even if I'd had it, I was now, in the plainest possible sense, a complainant. My father had been the subject of a call I believed was false and malicious. My property had been flagged. Anything I did about Marcella Vasbinder from that morning forward would be colored by that, and anybody who has spent eleven years in Professional Standards knows exactly what happens to an investigation that starts with a chief's grudge. It dies in court, and it deserves to.
So I did what a private citizen does. I wrote it all down, that morning, with times. I requested a copy of the incident report through the city's public records portal, the same as anybody could. I went to the Fernhill Public Library on Main Street, a pretty old Carnegie building with a creaking staircase, and I asked the reference librarian for the city code, and she found me the Chronic Nuisance Property Ordinance, Chapter 14, Article Six, adopted four years ago on the recommendation of then-Chief Ellsworth Breedlove.
It was short and it was blunt. Any property generating three or more "nuisance activity calls for service" within sixty days could be designated a chronic nuisance by the Chief of Police or his designee. Nuisance activity was defined broadly: noise, disorderly conduct, "suspicious activity," "conditions detrimental to neighborhood character," a dozen other things. After designation, each additional call for service cost the owner five hundred dollars, regardless of outcome. Unpaid fines became liens on the property. There was an appeal process, and it was to the Chief of Police.
I've seen ordinances like it before. They were fashionable for a while, sold as a way to shut down drug houses without arresting anybody. In practice, in a lot of places, they ended up punishing domestic violence victims for calling 911 and landlords for renting to people with complicated lives. They count calls. They don't care who makes them.
Then I went home and read the rest of the covenants, all forty-four pages, at the kitchen table, while Daddy did the word jumble in the paper and asked me what a seven-letter word for "bewildered" was. ("Baffled is six," he said. "Puzzled is seven," I said. "Hm," he said, and wrote it in.) On page thirty-one, in Article Nine, I found what I was looking for. It had been added by amendment, three and a half years ago, with the signature of the board president, M. Vasbinder: Any Lot designated a public nuisance or chronic nuisance property by any municipal authority shall be deemed in continuing violation of these Covenants and subject to a fine of $250 per month until such designation is removed. Fines shall constitute a lien against the Lot, enforceable by foreclosure as provided by law.
A city fine for every call. An HOA fine every month on top of it. Both liens. Both enforceable. And the calls, in Bittern Ridge, ran through one woman's phone.
I didn't know yet what it added up to. But I knew how it would look to a family that couldn't keep up, and I knew how it would look to an old man.
That evening, I was getting the mail when Marcella came down the sidewalk on her walk. The mailboxes in Bittern Ridge are in clusters, gray metal pods with little doors, and ours stood at the corner by her house, so there was no avoiding each other. She saw me and slowed. I'll give her this: she didn't turn around.
"Mrs. Quarterman."
"Mrs. Vasbinder."