She stayed about twenty minutes. She didn't talk about the investigation and I didn't ask. She talked about Simon, mostly, and about the tomatoes he used to grow, Cherokee Purples, and how she hadn't been able to bring herself to plant them since. My father told her the Cherokee Purple was a fine tomato but the Mortgage Lifter was better, and she laughed, a sudden, startled laugh, and then stopped laughing, because of the name, and then my father laughed too, because he'd heard it, and for a moment all three of us were laughing on the porch about a tomato, and it was the strangest moment I'd had in Fernhill.
When she left, she stopped at the bottom of the steps and said, without turning around, "Agent Mbatha told me about my house. On the list."
"I know," I said. "I'm sorry."
"I thought they were my friends. Cyrus and Garrett. I thought we were protecting something together." She looked up the street at the big gray house. "I thought I was the one who cared."
"You did care," I said. "That was what they were counting on."
She went home. The next morning, she resigned as president of the Bittern Ridge Homeowners Association, by letter, effective immediately, and asked the board to put the repeal of the Article Nine amendment on the agenda of a special meeting.
The special meeting was the second Tuesday in November, in the clubhouse by the pond, and it was the best-attended meeting in the HOA's history, according to Fitzgerald, who'd become interim president mostly by not leaving the room fast enough when they voted. There were people standing in the doorway and out onto the pool deck. Pa Houa Lor came, in a quilted jacket, with Tou to translate, and sat in the front row with a bag of long beans on her lap that she later distributed to the board. Mr. Pettiford's grandson Marquis came, in his work uniform from the tire shop, and stood at the back with his arms crossed.
I went as a homeowner. I sat in the back row. I didn't speak, not once, and when someone in the third row stood up and asked whether "the chief" had any comment, I said, "The chief is recused, and the homeowner at 212 votes yes," and sat back down, and people laughed, and that was the end of that.
Marcella spoke. She hadn't been asked to, and some people didn't want her to, and there was muttering when she stood. She spoke for less than two minutes. She said that she'd made more than two hundred reports to the police in four years, and that she'd believed she was protecting the neighborhood, and that she had been wrong, and that people had lost their homes because of it. She named them. All seven households. She got through the first four and her voice gave out on the fifth, and Fitzgerald, who was sitting beside her, read the last three for her. She said she'd be cooperating with the state investigation and with any civil action brought by the families, and that she wasn't asking anyone's forgiveness, and she sat down.